Linda Drummond’s handwriting was changing. Her normal loops and flourishes were shrinking into a cramped scrawl that was work to put on the page.

It was 2001. She was thirty-nine years old with two daughters, six and nine.  She thought she had pinched a nerve in her neck. Wouldn’t that also account for the new tremor in her right hand? An orthopedic doctor poked, prodded, and tested in search of a cause for her troubles. He injected pain medicine into her spinal column and cortisone into her muscles, all in an attempt to fix the tremor. Nothing worked.

Stumped, he sent her to a neurologist. That was 2002.

The neurologist thought she had something called essential tremor, which makes hands shake. He put her on anti-seizure medication. A pharmacist’s error gave her pills five times stronger than the doctor prescribed. The overdose put her in bed for days, worse than before.

Discouraged, she waited four years to visit a doctor again. By then, every day was an exhausting battle. Her gait had changed, her walk had slowed, and she had trouble starting from a dead stop; it was like pressing the accelerator in the car and never knowing when the engine would catch.

“When I went somewhere with friends, I couldn’t keep up. I was shuffling my feet,” she said. When washed her hair, her hands wouldn’t coordinate to scrub her scalp. And the tremor in her right hand was worse. Even the way she interacted with daughters Jordan and Mallory changed.

“It was hard for them to understand that they couldn’t just rush up and hug me,” she said. “They’d run up, and I’d say, ‘You have to give Mama a warning, because I could fall backwards. You got to warn me.’”

Still, in many ways, she went on as always, and successfully. In 2005, she became regional president of Charter Bank, where she’d worked since 1990.

The next year, though, she returned to the neurologist who had diagnosed her with essential tremor. He immediately realized his mistake. She had Parkinson’s disease. She was younger than most Parkinson’s patients. The average age of onset is sixty. But by this visit, she expected the diagnosis. “I just kind of knew that’s what I had, so it didn’t really shock me, I just kind of went cold. It shocked my family more.”

Her sister Abbey acquired many books on the disease, but Drummond just pushed them to the side.

“I went into the denial mode. I had a very public job and I was in the hiding mode,” she said. She worked mightily to control her tremors so bank customers wouldn’t know how sick she was. The effort to hide symptoms left her exhausted and even sore.

Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that initially causes shaking and rigidity. Movement slows, balance suffers, and walking grows difficult. The symptoms result from an unexplained but gradual death of a group of neurons that produce dopamine, which plays an important role in movement. Although the disease is not terminal, the symptoms worsen over time, and there is no cure.

Today, few would know Linda Drummond battles a life-changing diagnosis. Her symptoms are barely detectable.

“I recently went horseback riding in the Dominican Republic,” she said. “That’s something I couldn’t have even imagined doing a couple of years ago.”

But the journey to this moment took everything she had. The Parkinson’s diagnosis didn’t come with effective treatment. None of the anti-Parkinson’s medications the neurologist gave her seemed to work.

Instead, they caused itching, a rash, and redness. Her tongue swelled. She was allergic to the drugs. “They were just horrible. They made you crazy.” They caused hallucinations and sleepwalking.

“I call 2007 the year I lived outside myself,” she said.

One morning that year she woke to find she had filled out a stack of forms asking accounts payable to write checks to pay various bills. “They were just filled out all crazy. I remember doing it, but I was not in my right mind.” One form asked that a check for $500 be made out to her. In the “for” section she’d written, “In need of rest.”

Instead of trying new drugs, her neurologist retreated. “I think he thought I was a hypochondriac. He got tired of fooling with me.” The neurologist’s office called her. “The doctor says there’s nothing else he can do for you,” a staff member said. That was December 2007.

Abandoned by her caregiver, she trudged forward without medication for the next eight months. It was a nightmare. But through it all, the 1980 graduate of Opelika High never stopped working. “I have an amazingly supportive staff here,” boasted Drummond. “We’ve had the same group for six years. They really watch out for me. When they’d see me shuffling across the lobby, they’d say ‘Big steps! Take big steps!’” Parkinson’s patients tend to use ever-smaller movements.

The buzzing of a pager also helped keep up her spirits. It isn’t your usual pager. When it sounded, it meant someone was praying for her.

“It would go off hundreds of times a day. When it did, it was just very emotional. I met a couple from church who my husband knows but I’d never met. The woman said, ‘I pray for you at 9 o’clock every day. When your pager goes off, you’ll know it’s me.’ To meet that person, to know she was sending that page, that she was praying for me, was very emotional for me.”

Her friend, Lisa Beck, owner of the Event Center Downtown in Opelika, watched Drummond’s efforts. “She always puts others first; she just shows up,” Beck said. “When she was working in the Valley office, there was a woman who worked for her who was in an abusive marriage. When Linda got moved to the Opelika branch, she had this woman transferred, helped her finance her first home, and gave her a refrigerator as a house-warming gift.”

Beck organized a party in Drummond’s honor, to pay her back for all the good she did.

But even these many signs of support, without medication, the disease was beating her up.

“It makes me feel like the Tin Man with no grease. I’m slow. I’m rigid. The tremors were bad. I’m hopeless and I don’t know where to turn. That’s when three different angels appeared to me.”
One day in May 2008 a man from Atlanta visited to talk to her about the company that built her house and the one he wanted to buy a few doors away. During the conversation he revealed that his wife had Parkinson’s. Her doctor, Dr. Ray Watts, had just moved from Emory University in Atlanta to the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The visit made Drummond remember something, and she paged through her phone log to see the notes she made during a recent call. Her records revealed that an out-of-state coworker had praised a neurologist at UAB. The neurologist’s name? Dr. Ray Watts.

The day after the Atlanta man’s visit, a friend came into the bank with a message. “She goes, ‘Linda, there’s this guy you need to see.’” The friend had heard his name during her own hospital stay. “Everybody raved about him. His name is Dr. Ray Watts.’

“It was like God was slapping me in the face saying, ‘Hello!’ I got right on the phone.”

Dr. Ray L. Watts isn’t just any neurologist. He’s the author of more than thirty research papers, most on Parkinson’s disease and its treatment. He’s also dean of the UAB School of Medicine and senior vice president for medicine at the university. While at Emory, he helped develop a highly regarded research and clinical center for Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders. He arrived at UAB pledging to make its neurology department one of the top 10 in the nation. During her first visit to Watts in September 2008, the neurologist told her, “I can’t cure you, but I’ve never met anybody I haven’t been able to make better.”

It took awhile. He tried one medication she didn’t respond to, so he switched to another well-known Parkinson’s drug, Azilect, and, true to form for Drummond, it had absolutely the wrong effect.

“It made the tremors worse. I just had a total meltdown.”

Now she was ready to try something she’d only read about, a surgery called deep brain stimulation, in which surgeons implant electrodes in the brain to control Parkinson’s symptoms.

“I went back to him and said, ‘When can we talk about surgery.’”

“We can talk about surgery,” he answered. “But you need to get your mind right. You’ve had a traumatic experience. Just hold on, bear with me, give yourself a rest, and come back in January.”

In January 2009, Watts put her on the drug long used for effective Parkinson’s control — Sinemet. It includes a chemical that the brain converts to dopamine. If she responded to Sinemet, she might be a candidate for surgery, he told her.

Respond she did. Unfortunately, the drug doesn’t help forever. As the brain loses more dopamine-producing neurons, the Sinemet dosage must increase. But higher doses of Sinemet come with a sizeable side effect — writhing involuntary movements called dyskinesia.

By summer of 2009, she could no longer tolerate the Sinemet. “The side effects were worse than Parkinson’s.” Before long, the abnormal, repetitive movements produced pain.

Now surgery was her only option. But more evaluations remained. Doctors looked at her brain with magnetic resonance imaging and put her through psychological evaluation. At one point, a doctor asked her why she wanted the surgery.

“I have two children. If I can improve the quality of my life today, why would I wait until I’m seventy?”

“It must have been the right answer,” she said. “I had surgery November 21, 2009.”

Deep brain stimulation involves implanting an electrode no wider than the thickness of a credit card into the brain. When placed in the right spot, a steady low-voltage pulse is thought to block the noise from misfiring neurons, although just how the pulses improve Parkinson’s symptoms isn’t certain.

Despite its success, the procedure carries a serious risk of complications and side effects. Drummond was undaunted.

“I wanted to be able to work another fifteen years, to travel, to exercise again. I was completely at peace because I just knew the surgery would work for me. I was absolutely willing to take the risk.”

Before her first surgery – her Parkinson’s required a surgery in each of the brain’s two halves — Drummond invited her girlfriends over for a head-shaving party. “I thought it would help everybody get over the shock of seeing me bald,” she said, “and it felt like a celebration and a sendoff for me. We had a lot of fun.”

Her friends shared her excitement. “I was just so nervous for her and excited at the same time,” said Beck. “She had been so hopeful for this surgery for so long, and she went through so much to get approved. It was great when she found out she was finally going to have it. And the results were almost immediately miraculous.”

Drummond was awake for the surgery. Surgeons needed to ask her to speak and move to ensure the electrodes were in the proper position. First, the surgeon screwed a metal frame — called a halo — into her skull so she would be unable to move while surgeons drilled a hole in her skull and inserted the electrode.

The procedure itself was a weird sensation. “I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear the drill and feel the pressure on top of my head. It is freaky,” she said. Still, she wisecracked through the procedure. When surgeons are finding their way through the brain, there is an audible signal, like static, that helps tell them calculate where they are in the brain. At one point during the surgery, the volume of this noise was too loud and the three doctors in the operating room were momentarily stumped about how to turn it down. Drummond asked them: “How many brain surgeons does it take to get the volume working on a computer?” One of the surgeons turned to her and held up three fingers.

Although it was several weeks before doctors turn on the electrode, the effect of surgery is immediate.

“There’s a little honeymoon period,” Drummond said. “It’s from the testing during surgery. They tickle that little part of your brain, and you immediately feel better. Immediately, I wasn’t shaking. I walked better. I’m balanced.”

She was back at work in a week. “I’d just put on my wig and go,” she said. “I felt so much better almost immediately. I got my life back!”

While that honeymoon period is short-lived, as it began to wane Drummond went to the neurologist office to have the electrode turned on.

“It felt like a wave of motion for about five seconds,” she said. Then she was fine. “It has been amazing.”

The first surgery placed an electrode in the left side of her brain, which controls movement on the right side of the body, where Drummond’s tremors were worst. On January 10 last year, her neurologist asked her, “What’s your biggest complaint?”

“The tremors on my left side,” she said. Four months later, surgeons put an electrode in the right side of her brain and took those tremors away.

Now most of Drummond’s symptoms are controlled by electric stimuli sent intermittently to the brain — 3.9 volts to the left side, 2.8 volts to the right. A device implanted beneath the skin of her chest, near her collarbone, controls the stimuli. She can adjust the level of stimulation with a remote control she carried in her purse. Every three to five years, surgeons will replace the battery in her chest unit.

“My daughters Mallory and Jordan call it my ‘evil twin’,” she says with a laugh. “But it doesn’t bother me. I’m just so happy to be able to do everything again, like changing a light bulb or drying myself off from the shower. I had to rely on my husband David for that. I felt like such a burden.”

Drummond still takes Sinemet to treat tremors, spasms and poor muscle control, but the dosage is about half of what she took before surgery.

You can find Drummond many mornings at the Opelika SportsPlex working out. She’ll be heading to Alaska on a cruise with two other couples in July. Later, she’ll go on a mission trip to work in an orphanage in Honduras – an impossible prospect just two years ago.

A few years ago, Drummond got involved with the newly formed Auburn/Opelika Parkinson’s Disease Support Group, which meets the second Sunday of each month from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. at Monarch Estates, 1550 East University Drive, Auburn. She says the group helps her cope, and it allows her to help others by sharing her experiences. Recently, Drummond was appointed to the Parkinson Association of Alabama’s Board of Directors.

“I think positively, but you never know what the future holds,” Drummond said. “You don’t take anything for granted. And you just take things one day at a time and remember how blessed you are.”

Drummond says she gets her strength and positive outlook from her friends and her faith. She remembers a sermon from a Sunday last summer. Her pastor, Steve Scoggins at First Baptist Church in Opelika, said, “If we never had a problem and experienced suffering then we would never know God could help us.”

She remembers clearly the scripture he recited next, and keeps it in her heart when she thinks about her life. It’s from Romans in the New Testament. “We also rejoice in our suffering, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.”

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Mary Wood Littleton is a freelance writer from Auburn. She has been a corporate communications consultant for nearly twenty years, working with such companies as CNN/Turner Broadcasting, IBM, Earthlink, Burger King Corporation and the College Board in Atlanta, Miami, and New York.