Howdy, everyone. I'll get to the bulk of this post right after I update everyone on how things have gone so far. I'll try and keep this part short. No, I'm not going to go over anything here but PD progress.
I recently had a visit with my new Movement Disorder Specialist. His name is Dr. Aaron Haug (I believe I've spelled that last name correctly). He appeared to be an attentive and knowledgeable doctor, and personable as well. I think we'll get along just great. At least as far as first impressions go. We went over my account of my medical history, correcting a few things that someone was wrong in it, like which side it started on. (It had the right side, when it was my left arm that started tremoring, though what might have been confusing is my right side ended up surpassing my left in its degree of tremors.) I like him so far. One of the things I feared is whether he was the trusting kind with my DBS settings. My former neurologist gave me a fair amount of leeway in allowing me to adjust my settings. I was afraid this doctor might be more restrictive than that. But he wasn't, he was fine.
He appeared to understand where I was coming from, and why I no longer took any medications. That's because the few times I've taken some levodopa, one pill, I had a slight return of my dyskenisa. Nothing most people would notice, but I could feel the old familiar pull on my neck. Apparently I'm very sensitive to that aspect, so I'm very thankful that the DBS works so well.
The rest of the update will be in the following article that I will go to now, about low testosterone in men with PD. Note: this does get into a more personal issue. Nothing graphic, but does involve a more personal matter. If that bothers you, don't read it. You have been warned!
One of the issues that many face when they get PD is a declining libido. However, I had not specifically had that problem. Yes, my libido had declined a little since I'd started showing PD symptoms, but I was still able to "function" around 50% to 70% of the time, depending on what else was going on.
Then, once I had my DBS put in, everything down below simply stopped working. At first, after some research, I figured I would need to wait around nine months and see where I was at. For those that haven't read/watched my DBS posts, it takes around three to six months for the swelling in the brain to go down. I found a study on sexual satisfaction after DBS, and it was around half who thought it improved, and half that thought it declined. Uh, I would be in the latter half by nine months out, the earliest the study would take someone. Apparently, they wanted to make sure that the people they took were around a minimum of three months of settling down after their brain swelling should have resided.
At the time, I thought, "Well, I'll just wait until nine months to evaluate this situation again. Meanwhile, I was prescribed generic Viagra to help, which it did, but not enough to "finish the job."
On top of that was my difficulty initially (and still exist, though not to the degree it did in the first six months) coordinating my movements. When nine months were up, I realized my situation had not really improved significantly. Some, but nothing that put things right again. So I figured it was due to that inability to control my movements, which my previous neurologist said made sense. So I continued on, trying to add levodopa back into the mix some, which didn't really improve things much, and like I said, sort of gave me a low form of dyskenisa.
So i had pretty much given up by that point. Figured this was the way things were. And I would gladly give that part of my life up if required to have a better quality of life in other areas.
Then one day recently, something made me wonder about testosterone. So I started to do some research, I typed into the search engine, "Parkinson's testosterone" and came up with some articles that described that PD often resulted in a lower testosterone levels in men than in control groups about the same age.
Then it hit me. "What if I have low testosterone?" So on that hunch, I did another search on "levodopa testosterone," and pulled up some articles that confirmed my suspicions: that levodopa helps raise testosterone in PD patients. Suddenly, it all made sense. I regularly took levodopa up until, I had DBS! Once I lost that extra dopamine flying around in my brain since DBS had taken over, my testosterone had dropped as well. I didn't have that much dopamine up in my brain any longer. Apparently, dopamine is one of the keys in the production of testosterone.
So, I've contacted my neurologist to refer me to a urologist to test that, as well as any other reasons I might be having problems. Of course, if I do have low testosterone, it could mean getting a shot every 2 weeks for the rest of my life. Ug. That is, unless my insurance will pay for the much more expensive gel drug and such. I have yet to go to the urologist, he/she hasn't even called me yet to make an appointment. So I'll try and get on here and report any diagnosis I end up with once I find out what that is.
At any rate, that might help someone who reads this and is having the same problem. Thanks for reading and I'll be back!
