Shared from parkinsonsnewstoday.com.
Almost daily I’m reminded of how fortunate I am to have had deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery to treat my Parkinson’s disease.
I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2013, at the age of 36. In the fall of 2019, I had DBS surgery. My life has been unquestionably better since then, but DBS isn’t a cure. Rather, it’s the start of a journey.
I don’t know what I thought my life would look like 12 years after being diagnosed, but I do know that I imagined it’d be much worse than it’s turned out to be. Because May is my birthday month, I’m thinking about my 40th birthday, when I threw a huge, fancy party. In retrospect, I think I did that because I didn’t expect to make it to 50. Well, here I am at 48, doing better than I was at 40. And I credit DBS for much of that.