The November Chronicles

I awoke with the alarm and while I went about getting ready for my day, I made myself be aware of two things:  (1) Try to appear normal so as to not alert The Awesome Boyfriend that I wasn't going to work but was heading to a doctor's appointment and (2) try to occasionally notice what I was doing - or not doing - when my arm began to shake.

I took a shower, fed the cats, got dressed, gathered my work items, kissed The Awesome Boyfriend farewell, and left home and not once ... NOT ONE STUPID TIME ... did my arm shake.  I drove to my coffee shop and sat at what used to be "my" table and read the morning paper.  No shake.  I drove to the hospital and parked.  No shake.  Maybe I had cured it by just making the appointment.

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So it was that my wounded ego, banged-up chin, no-longer shaking arm and I registered for our 8:30am appointment.  As I sat in the waiting room, I glanced at the stack of magazines in the corner.  As God as my witness, the smiling, eternally youthful face of Michael J Fox underneath the “Good Housekeeping” header stared back at me.

“Oh just fuck you”, I muttered to the room.

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My doctor walked in and shook my hand with our introductions.  “Good grip”, he said.  “Damn thing hasn’t shaken once today”, I responded.  We did the standard question and answer routine (smoke?  No.  Exercise?  No.  Sleep?  Pretty well.) and then we did a few basic strength tests - push/pull motions, holding my arms out in front of me, rotating my shoulders and neck, etc.  Since there was no numbness, lack of movement, or stiffness, he thought a pinched nerve was unlikely.

I wasn't happy about this.  A pinched nerve was what I wanted to hear.  A pinched nerve eventually will heal.  Ruling it out left the scarier stuff on the table.

He moved into my medical history and asked about my past prescriptions, which was when I told him I used to take Maxalt for migraine pain and Inderal for daily migraine management but that my prescriptions ran out about the time this started to get worse.  He nodded and set down his clipboard.

It seems Inderal was created for - catch this - "chest pain, heart attack prevention or treatment, hypertension, tremors, heart rhythm disorders and other circulatory concerns". As it was being prescribed to recent stroke victims, more and more patients who were also migraine sufferers reported back that the frequency of their migraine attacks went wayyyyyy down.  So the manufacturer ran tests and - lo and behold - they'd accidentally created a migraine suppressant.  Here I was being given this to prevent my migraines because this stuff had a good side effect ……. and it's likely I'd been "shaking" the whole time.  I'd just happened to be taking the right pill to suppress the tremor.

As he was telling me this, he glanced to my arm – which was shaking. “That”, he said, “doesn’t look like a Parkinson’s shake … not even close. A Parkinson’s shake is more of a finger-pill rolling kind of thing … that is an ‘Essential Tremor’ shake.”

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After years … YEARS … I had a name – “Essential Tremor” - or, as I heard it in my head - “Not Gonna Kill Me”.