In the Beginning, I Shook

    Well, this wasn’t my next posting.  Not after I saw that portajohn thing.  I did, as I read my postings again, say something about fleshing out the story of how all this started.  How my life changed in a hurry is how I think I said it.  Let me check… yeah, that’s the wording I used.  Not that it’s all that important.  This is a week that lives in infamy for me, just to put it out there.  I spent the entire week thinking that I was going out of my gourd. 
   
    On a Sunday morning, we got stuck working, once again, with four nursing assistants to fifty-two residents.  This is always a busy day, especially when a good seventy percent of the residents required total care.  When you have to wash the resident, dress the resident, and put the resident in his or her wheelchair with no help from the resident, the time you have to spend with one person increases exponentially.  The assignments said we had thirteen residents to do this with, minus those washed and dressed by the night shift. My coworker-slash-friend and I decided that we would just tag team the two assignments. 
   
    All went well before breakfast.  When we got done with care and started passing trays, we had twelve people left and, since it was a Sunday, no showers to do.  Everyone would be getting a basin bath on this day.  The day turned around when she (I’m not using names here) went in to set one particular resident up with her wash basin.  The problem with this resident is her timing in trying to hold a nursing assistant in her room to do ten million things that could probably wait is bad to be fair.  My thoughts on the matter of that are immaterial.  It suffices to say that I think that habit is not accidental.

    With my coworker being held in that room, I’m rushing to get things done by eleven.  By the time my coworker emerged from that room, it was quarter to eleven with three people left, one of which is going to take a good twenty minutes to bathe.  I was wigging out.  I give props to my coworker still being calm, but I put my hands on my forehead in exasperation.  That’s when she said to me,
   
    “Go take a break.”

    I argued this idea.  There was too much left to do.  She wasn’t having it.

    “Jon, you’re shaking,” she said.  I wasn’t aware of it.  At that point, I didn’t think anything of it either.  I did what I was told and went down to the break room and downed a cup of coffee.  I got back to the floor, we finished getting everyone washed, and that was all for that on that day.

    Jump forward to the following Wednesday.  I had a rehearsal for the music team at my church.  I had been shaking the entire day to that point, and I told the director that I felt like I was losing my mind.  I had sent out a text message the previous evening that I didn’t even remember sending.  The proof was there on my phone.  I’d have been okay with that had I been drunk, but no.  I hadn’t had an alcoholic beverage in a couple of months.  The main problem with the shaking was I couldn’t make it stop.  I was anxious enough that to this point, I didn’t even notice the nature of the shake.  Otherwise what happened later may have rolled differently.

    When I got home, I decided that an anxiety attack was one thing, but the fact that I was shaking was a bit worrisome.  So off to the Emergency Room I went.  I told them I was shaky, I was anxious, and that at this point I was having a bit of trouble walking.  I attribute that to the extra stress I was under.  It was sad, too.  I couldn’t walk without holding on to something.  They put me in a wheelchair and then the wait.  The wait was so long that I wound up calling off from work the next day.  When I got to the back, they took a CT scan of my head, told me to pee in a cup, gave me some Ativan, and sent me home.

    In the morning, after having calmed down a bit, I noticed that the shakiness was still there.  That’s when I noticed the main problem.  Only my right hand was shaking.  I held it up.  It shook.  I held up my left hand.  It was solid.  I spent about twenty minutes alternating hands.  Talk about a good scare, this beat anything I have ever experienced except the day I came down with appendicitis when I was twelve.  Even that was just painful.  Given my experience working neurosurgical step down at UPMC, I learned enough on that unit to know that this shaking in only one hand was not a good thing.   Then I noticed that if I moved my hand, the shaking stopped.  I had no idea that this “resting tremor” was the type of tremor most often seen in Parkinson’s Disease.  Not till I got stupid much later.

    The next few months blurred by.  First I was sent for an MRI  of my neck.  That showed two bulging discs that bulged to the left.  They explained the pain I get in my left shoulder nicely, but not the shaking in my right hand.  Next was an MRI of the brain.  Then was a nerve conduction study with an EMG.  First the shock you from the outside, and then the put a needle in your muscles and shock you from the inside.  This was the most interesting test.  Although my hand and arm shook uncontrollably, this test came back normal.

    There, that wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.  Don’t get me wrong, I hate recalling that process.  And I sit here now, in front of the computer, telling this story for you, reader.  I don’t know if there is any benefit to it, maybe some kind of a therapeutic thing.  I don’t really know.  But that’s how it began.