It didn’t work – in fact SINEMET made my symptoms worse and gave me some I hadn’t had before: Freezing, a late stage PD symptom, in which, well, you freeze in place for a short time then carry on, and Paranoia. Such paradoxical side effects of low doses are considered normal. Apparently.
Later on I met a woman in Vancouver International Airport who told me that the meds I take now (2012 - Prolopa, my 4th attempt at symptom management) worked so well for her ex-husband that he upped his dose and became schizophrenic.
PD: a loss of the neurotransmitter dopamine; Schizophrenia an excess of it. The Dopamine Spectrum.
(I learned later that medically it doesn’t actually work that way. A pre-disposition to Psychosis can collaborate with excess dopamine drugs to bring on Psychosis as a rare side effect.)
It took a year and a half before the Big Specialist was sure. It took me a year or so longer. It was a PET Scan that finally convinced my visual artist’s mind in vivid colour of the loss of Dopamine.
Positron Emission Tomography (PET)
PET imaging is used in researching biochemical changes associated with brain disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and psychiatric disorders, and in diagnosing a range of diseases, including cancer, neurological disorders, and cardiac disease. The PET procedure involves administering to the patient a radioactive tracer that concentrates in specific areas of the body (e.g. in tumours), allowing the PET machine to detect the radiation and construct an image of the chemical processes in that area. A PET scan provides an image of the functional details (e.g. metabolic processes) of the body, whereas an X-ray or a CT scan shows only structural details (e.g. bone and cartilage). -- http://www.triumf.info/public/tech_transfer/pet.php
The image is a mirror image: the right side of the image is really the left side of the brain and the left side of the image is the right side of the brain. The scan I completed is called a Dihydrotetrabenazine PET Scan. Dihydrotetrabenazine scans provide information about dopamine storage in the nerve cells. The red and more gold are on the right side of the image. The lack of these colours in a scan indicates the reduction in dopamine (symptoms thus on my left side).
I don’t understand the science or the technology but I could see that something was clearly wrong where Medicine was telling me it was. Having the symptoms (muscle rigidity, tremor, dystonia) was not enough. I had other explanations for that...
