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| Unique Visitors: 0 |
| Total Unique Visitors: 1901 |
| Visitors Out: 2073 |
| Total Visitors Out: 9462 |
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| HUBRIS!!! I Am Guilty of HUBRIS!!! |
| 2007-08-09 10:37:13 |
AUGUST 9, 2007
All right. Yesterday, I wrote the following words…
Tonight I will leave the office at 3:30, get to the METRO 10 minutes later, arrive at Union Station by 4:15 and catch the MARC Camden Line train at 4:39, which is supposed to have me to Dorsey Station by 5:22 p.m.
Hubris! Pure, unadulterated hubris! Excessive self-confidence to the point of arrogance. I really, really thought I could leave my office and get home in a time frame much like I described above.
I am a fool.
Oh, I did leave the office at 3:30. And I caught a shuttle to the METRO Station just about the time I walked out the front door. That part of the trip home went very well.
When I arrived at the Medical Center METRO Station and rode the longest escalator in the world (I think it really is!) down into the bowels of the Earth, only then did I learn what horror awaited.
Someone was making an announcement over the loudspeaker. It sounded like this:
“Attention, METR...
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| A Rant (About Infrastructure) |
| 2007-08-08 14:37:33 |
(TRANSCRIPT -- AUGUST 8, 2007 PODCAST) We’re going to hell in a hand basket. As a country, I mean. And I’m talking about our infrastructure.
Bear with me. This has nothing to do with Parkinson’s or my DBS surgery. I just feel a long-overdue and righteous rant coming on.
The bridge collapse in Minneapolis, for instance… I’m frankly shocked that we don’t hear about stuff like that happening every day. Just look at the condition of our infrastructure. What ISN’T on the verge of breaking down?
Let’s start with our train system. Here in Maryland, we have the MARC trains that run from Baltimore to DC. I’m not sure what MARC stands for – it may stand for “Maryland Amateur Railroad Club.” In DC proper, you have the METRO – a combination subway/above-ground rail system. Not a week goes by where SOMETHING doesn’t break on either the MARC or the METRO…...
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| Billy Dent Head |
| 2007-07-23 10:32:53 |
It's no big deal. Really, it's not. But I seem to have developed two dents in my head. Since the healing of the surgical scars from my DBS surgery on June 13, I've noticed that there's a bit of a dent towards the front of the scar on the right side of my scalp, and another one just posterior of the burr hole cap that fills the hole the doctor drilled in my skull. It's nothing terribly serious... they look like what you might expect from a large hailstone hitting the hood of your car. My son the auto mechanic has offered to get his hands on a dent-puller at work to fix these dents, but somehow I don't think that is a good idea. Nor do I like his suggestion of filling in the dents with spackle and then sanding them down. But his heart is in the right place.
Now that the old bean is healing up, I will actually walk around in the presence of people without covering my disfigurement with a hat. When everything was still all scabby, I felt the ...
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| PD -- The Early Days |
| 2007-07-18 09:05:36 |
SUMMER 1972
The table was set for lunch, although they called it “supper.” I never understood that. To me the word “supper” was interchangeable with the word “dinner.” But I didn’t care what they called it. After a long, hot morning of hauling hay bales with my brother Bob and our friend Eric, I was hungry. And whatever what they called it, there sure was a lot of it! Hot fresh baked rolls with honey to slather over them. A huge bowl of boiled potatoes mashed with the peels still on them. Corn on the cob drizzled with melted butter. A pitcher of Kool-Aid that, for some reason, they called “nectar.” And chicken! Heaping mounds of it. Hot, crispy, golden fried. Delicious!
A guy didn’t make much money hauling hay bales on the Bornemann farm. A nickel per bale ...
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| First Programming -- Done! |
| 2007-07-10 13:54:00 |
I overslept this morning. Got home from Nashville at around 8:15, went to bed shortly after 9, got up at 4:45 a.m. I’m usually up by 4. It’s an occupational hazard. Now that I’m taking the train every day, I gotta be at the train station by 5:51 in order to get to work at or near 7 a.m. No time for coffee this morning, and that probably has more to do with my sense of ennui than does the fact that my Deep Brain Stimulation is turned on, programmed and functioning.The flight to Nashville was uneventful, except for the young father and his two darling, precocious little treasures who sat in the seats in front of me. I’m guessing they were around 2 and 4 respectively and neither child has yet developed an “inside voice.” They weren’t cry...
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| The Stimulators are IN!!! |
| 2007-07-05 10:05:00 |
Huzzah! I'm home. No more surgery! The neurostimulators are in. All that remains is the programming.Out of all three phases of DBS surgery, I think this has been the most painful, even though it was far less complicated than the insertion of the brain leads -- and far less demanding physically and emotionally. I wonder if this is what women feel like when they get breast implants put in. When I woke up from the anesthesia, one of the first things I noticed was that my neck hurt like hell. In my dazed and confused state, I wondered -- "What the hell did they do to my neck??? Was I hard to intubate? Did they have to twist me into unusual shapes?" But then I realized the pain was caused by what they had to do to run the wires from the...
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| Two Down, One to Go |
| 2007-06-16 20:15:00 |
June 13, 2007. Here I am, in the surgical suite at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. All smiling and happy, without a care. Dr. Konrad, my esteemed neurosurgeon, snapped this shot with his Treo 650 cell phone. Then he took a photo of what was going on there on the other side of the plastic sheet.That is correct, sports fans! I have undergone Bilateral Deep Brain Stimulation of the Subthalamic Nucleus -- at least as far as placement of the electrode leads. The final surgery will be on July 3rd (moved from June 25) at which time Dr. Konrad will implant the Soletra impulse generator. What you see in the picture above is the frame made for me as a result of the previous operation (the bone markers), with the drivers installed, and the probes being ...
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| One Down, Two to Go! |
| 2007-06-08 10:09:31 |
I have four hunks of metal in my head. And now I look like Peter Boyle -- the monster in "Young Frankenstein."Well... kinda. See, here's Boyle as the dapper, man-about-town monster...And here's me.I guess I look a little happier than the monster... although he DOES have more hair.As you can see, I was wrong about where these bone markers would be placed. Based on the images in the Vanderbilt DBS booklet, I thought the markers would be installed in a diamond pattern.I got more of a "box" design. Or, more accurately, I look like some sort of giant cat bit me on the noggin.So. One operation down, two to go. I'll have the electrodes implanted on June 13. Then I'll have the stimulators installed on the 25th. At that point, the surgeries will be ove...
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| Last Looks at a Pristine Dome (WARNING -- Graphic Images of Surgery!!!) |
| 2007-06-01 08:35:00 |
WHAT DOLEFUL PLANET IS THIS, RISING MALEVOLENTLY ON AN ARID HORIZON? WHAT EVIL DOES IT FORETELL? WHAT ILL PORTENT DOES IT BRING? BY WHAT NAME SHALL THIS FOUL SPHERE BE KNOWN?Nay, Gentle Reader! It is no planet, no celestial body spinning in the empty cosmos.It's my dome.Freshly shaved for the insult that awaits it this month... for today is the first of June... and when the month is over, no longer will I be the owner of such a smooth, pristine dome! So, take your last looks. Admire it.Were you HERE, I would even invite you to TOUCH it! Because in a matter of days, it will no longer be so smooth, so shiny, so enticing and free of blemish. They -- and by "they", I mean the good doctors at Vanderbilt University Medical Center -- have PLANS for ...
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| Reality Rears Its Beautiful Face |
| 2007-05-29 10:58:00 |
By the way... Podcast #13 is online and available. Just in cast you're interested. You'll find the link at our home page -- http:www.billywisdom.com.One week from right now, I will be heading over to the radiology clinic at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center to have the four bone anchors drilled into my skull. They'll use these anchors to fasten the stereotactic platform to my noggin when the electrodes are inserted on the 13th. They'll put me under general anesthesia, put in the bone anchors -- which, to me, resemble nothing more than the kind of wall anchors you sink into drywall when you want to hang a heavy picture or mirror on the wall -- and then while I'm still being rocked in the gentle arms of Lady Anesthesia, they'll take advantage of my motionless condition to get CT and MRI photos so Dr. Konrad and his team can plan their surgical approach. Then I'll come home the following day and rest up for the big event.
At present, I'm restin...
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