As I said in my previous post, Corticobasal
Degeneration affects three things, walking, talking, and the control of my
emotions. This blog post will begin with the second of these, my speech.
My entire adult life I have been a preacher. That means that I have talked for a
living. I recall one of my ambitions as
a teenager was to work as a disc jockey, not because I loved music all that
much, but these were the only people I knew who were paid to talk. When I came to my last church I did get to
live out that dream by being the Monday morning host of the Shepherd’s Hour on WQSV AM 790. A position I held for 20 years. As someone said, I have a face that was made
for radio! Whether that is true or not,
I did have the voice for it. I believe
my primary spiritual gift is in the area of preaching and teaching and the
effective use of one’s voice is crucial to that endeavor. I distinctly remember my freshman speech
teacher, Mrs. Laura Thigpen telling me, “Randy, your voice is a fine instrument!” That is why vocal problems which began around
Christmas of 2014 were a particular concern to me.
It began with a rasp, the same sort of thing which
anyone might experience when dealing with a cold, or perhaps the day after
cheering your voice away at a ball game.
The first Sunday that this happened I remember thinking I must have
“preached my voice away.” While I would
not classify myself as a “screamer,” I can get loud when preaching and I had
delivered that sort of sermon the week before. I was sure that if I rested my voice for a day
or two and used a few throat lozenges, everything would be fine. It wasn’t.
I tried a number of home remedies and over the counter medications all
to no avail. A few months into all of
this my wife told me that I seemed to also be slurring some of my words.
These vocal issues combined with the beginning of
my walking problems had me genuinely worried.
The next step in the journey was actually a series of falls. I believe I fell down six times in about six
months. The most public of these was at
a high school basketball game where I fell while trying to negotiate the
bleachers. I don’t know who was more
surprised by this, me or the lady into whose lap I fell! Neither of us was hurt by this, but I do believe
my pride was a bit damaged as I was helped up and exited the gym leaning on my
dear wife.
It was a private fall which first brought me to my
doctor. Somehow I managed to slip in the
shower and bang my head on the wall as I went down. Joy was concerned that by the time I got
around to telling her I had a substantial goose egg on my temple. She insisted that I call our doctor who said
given where the swelling was, he wanted to see me immediately. After a brief exam he sent me to have a CT
scan in Nashville and while Joy and I were on the way home the doctor called me
with the results. Now Dr. Brown is
efficient, but I thought this quick a turn around on the report was
ominous. While not really a factor in
CBD my physician informed me that I had serious calcification of the arteries
in my brain. The CT technician had told
him, “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen.” I
mention all of this because that CT and later MRA would eventually send me to
Dr. Alfred Callahan, a neurologist in Nashville.
Dr. Callahan, one of the nicest people I’ve ever
met, listened to me describe my symptoms and then did a series of reflex
tests. He would order two MRI’s and an
EMG before venturing a guess about my diagnosis. He finally said, “I hope you don’t have it,
but I think you have Corticobasal Degeneration.” We talked about what that meant and then he
said, “I want to send you to Mayo Clinic to see if they can find some other
explanation. I hope they prove me
wrong.” I hoped they could as well.
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