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The months from March to July have
been heavily weighted toward the hope of acquiring a new neurologist
to help me manage Parkinson's. The contract neurologist at moutain
home quit providing consultant services and the VA's back up (hiring
outside physicians and paying for vets to be see) kicked in. Highly
unsatisfactory. I arrived at the appropriate office, already a month
behind schedule and needing new scripts for my meds. What I got for
VA's money was a referral to a university clinic 5 hours distant that
would not see me until next January. I tried to tell him that I
could not schedule the appointment – VA has to approve that
expense. He told me to come see him after I was seen in the
Vanderbilt clinic.
I wasted no time in contacting my
primary care doc. I am not about to let some LMD throw me into a
university clinic that would take a year to repeat a diagnosis and
then lose my records in their system. I hope I've opened a shit
storm over this. If not, I fully intend to. VA has its own movement
disorder consortium and I can telemed that clinic. We'll see what
happens.
Tremendous fatigue has set in, paire
with sleep ditsturbance. Makes it hard to anything some days and
difficult on many others
My daily hikes with my down stream
neighbor, Mike, have ended. We set out as usual about 0900 last
wednesday, 8 july. 0.3 miles down the road he simply fell over
backwards, no pulse, no respirations, no motion, no words. I was
about 3 steps in front of him when I eard the noise his head made
when it hit the pavement. Complicating the scene, it was at a sharp
curve in the road and the side we were on was overgrown with weeds so
that remaining where he fell would have put us both under the wheels
of the first vehicle coming our way.
I managed to flag a car, get the
driver to drive to a point with cell service and call 911. The she
flagged traffic. I did the first response things, airway,
pre-cordial thump. Nothing worked. He was dead when he fell over.
EMS arrive in about 10-14 minutes and lined and shocked him before
tranporting him 28 miles to Johnson City. He was pronounced there.
I had one contact number for his business partner. Called that
number and intiated the cascade. Memorial service Saturday
Rather a bummer of a week.
