Day 4: Tauroursodeoxycholic Acid

In case anyone is wondering, I'm only doing this daily report for a week. After that, it will be when I have something new to report in relation to anything, including taking this medicine.

I'll keep it short since I need to get to bed.

Day 4, Monday, 1/5/15

Side-effects: No negative side-effects noticed.

Symptom changes:

The improvement in cogwheel movement continues. I noticed it in particular when I cleaned a couple of toilets in a house and used my left hand to polish some wood. While it wasn't as effortless as my right hand, my movements weren't jerky and I had no problem controlling what I wanted my hand to do.

Likewise, today I had probably one of the longest smooth writing times for a day that I've had in a while. It only bogged down around 3:30 am this morning, about the time I sat down to write out my monthly Tuesday column at the SpecFaith blog (which I wrote, edited, formatted, and posted before 7 am). Now I'm writing this. While it isn't as smooth as most of yesterday, it is still decent. Just my left hand isn't as efficient.

Likewise, I can still sing a low bass note on demand. So that is still persisting as an improvement.

Probably the biggest change today is an improvement to a noticeable degree in dystonia (muscle stiffness/pain) and tremors. I believe I had the least amount of tremors in one day than I've had all last year and a few months before that.

I noticed it distinctly when we ate dinner. I had a sub. When I eat a sandwich, I'm usually holding it with my left hand and it is usually bobbing around. Today, all through eating a fairly long sub (everyone was waiting for me to finish), I held the sub in my left hand with not a tremor to be noticed.

Likewise, as I was vacuuming, I often hang my left thumb on the left pants pocket to let my arm hang loose. That seems to help the dystonia some than if it is just hanging at my side. Today, I felt little need to do that. I believe I even noticed my left arm swinging a little when I walked instead of being stiff as a board. Stiffness and tremors have been noticeably reduced. The only time I noticed any was when I had some stress added like in straining to do something. We'll see if that holds up in the days ahead or whether this was just an exceptional day.

The lower amount of toe curling seemed to also be holding in place as it was yesterday.

So overall, some improvement. Onto day 5.