In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.
This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world.
I had found myself thinking of time – time and perception, time and consciousness, time and memory, time and music, time and movement. I had returned, in particular, to the question of whether the apparently continuous passage of time and movement given to us by our eyes was an illusion – whether in fact our visual experience consisted of a series of timeless “moments” which were then welded together by some higher mechanism in the brain.
Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death.
The hateful mood of a migraine – depressed and withdrawn, or furious and irascible – tends to melt away in the stage of lysis, to melt away with the physiological secretion. “Resolution by secretion” thus resembles a catharsis on both physiological and psychological levels, like weeping for grief. The.
Sudden fright, or rage, or other strong emotion may disperse and displace a migraine almost within seconds. One.
I am haunted by the density of reality.
With neurology, if you go far enough with it, and you keep going, you end up getting weird. If you go a little further, you end up in the spirit.
I realize that if love were the cure, I would have been healed a long time ago.
The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing.
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.
The terrors of suffering, sickness and death, of losing ourselves and losing the world, are the most elemental and intense we know; and so too are our dreams of recovery and rebirth, of being wonderfully restored to ourselves and the world.
Clearly, passionately, he wanted something to do: he wanted to do, to be, to feel – and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose – in Freud’s words, ‘Work and Love’.
McKenzie once called Parkinsonism “an organized chaos,” and this is equally true of migraine. First there is chaos, then organization, a sick order; it is difficult to know which is worse! The nastiness of the first lies in its uncertainty, its flux; the nastiness of the second in its sense of immutable heavy permanence. Typically, indeed, treatment is only possible early, before migraine has “solidified” into immovable fixed forms.
I had been given not a remission, but an intermission, a time to deepen friendships, to see patients, to write, and to travel back to my homeland, England.
In the long hours that followed, I was assailed by memories, both good and bad. Most were in a mode of gratitude – gratitude for what I had been given by others, gratitude too that I had been able to give something back.
The perverse need for illness – both in patients themselves, and sometimes in those who are close to them – must be a major determinant in causing relapses, the most insidious enemy of the will-to-get-better:.
He said that he had learned Transcendental Meditation as a way of dealing with otherwise uncontrollable ticcing in public places.“It’s just autohypnosis,” he explained. “You have a mantra, a little word or phrase repeating slowly in your mind, and you soon get into a sort of trance and become oblivious to everything. It calms me down.” He remained almost tic-free for the rest of the evening.
We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative – whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a ‘narrative’, and that this narrative is us, our identities.
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends. I shall no longer look at the NewsHour every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.
There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever.