The Voices in My Head
There’s a party in my head. I hear the babble of voices, chattering indistinctly, volume swelling and diminishing in a flood of overlapping dialog I can’t quite decode. What? You don’t hear it? Nothing? Am I suffering from sound hallucinations? Is this another fiendish form of Parkinson’s torment?
No.
Just the opposite. It is a clever work-around for people with PD who have difficulty making themselves heard when speaking. The noise is real, generated by a small gizmo resembling a hearing aid that plays sound in my ear. It simulates the hubbub of a lively conversation, without using actual words. It’s as if a cocktail party was taking place inside my skull.
This faux fiesta, which is undetectable to those not equipped with the hardware, fools the wearer’s brain into thinking it must raise speaking volume level. Hey, Presto! The brain automatically cues louder speech as a reflexive reaction to compete with the perceived louder sound environment.
Ingenious! It is another great leap in my quest to approximate normal. In a world that struggles to be above average, to be separate from the crowd, I’m just trying to be perceived as a regular guy. This isn’t easy with PD. Pulling it off, to the extent I can, requires many artificial interventions, from a panoply of pills, to brain surgery, to the little noisemaker simulating small talk only I can hear.
Unfortunately, the voices in my head sometimes drown out actual voices I am trying to listen to. In order to solve one problem, speech that is too quiet, we make another area, hearing, worse. In its sheer perversity, this is SO Parkinson’s. But it does seem to be working, and in more ways than one.
I not only am speaking louder and more distinctly, but I’ve also noticed I am more likely to voice my thoughts than I have been in the last few years. For a while now I pretty much gave up on taking part in conversations. My role was silent observer, with nothing of value to contribute to the chatter. This reluctance to participate wasn’t about frustration at not being heard, it was a lack of confidence that I had something worth saying. (yes, I know this is hard to believe coming from a former political cartoonist. I used to be able to come up with as many as three quality opinions a day!) But as PD waxed in my system I found my ideas seemed dull, unoriginal or plain stupid. Why make the effort to dig them out, shine them up and present them for consideration? Instead, I would call in a preemptive strike, rubbing out my pedestrian thoughts before they could escape into the wild, not even bothering with trying to make my voice heard.
On the occasions when my opinion was solicited, I found to my surprise, I had none. My decaying speech was damping down my mental abilities as well as my physical ones. Not speaking turns out to be a use-it-or-lose-it phenomenon in more ways than one.
If you don’t practice an activity, your proficiency at that activity can dry up. I need to get back into the practice of having and sharing information and ideas with fellow humans. With the passage of time, I hope to return to my fully opinionated self.
After all, it would be a Pyrrhic victory to regain my powers of speech, only to find I have nothing to say.
by Peter Dunlap-Shohl
NW Parkinson’s Blogger
“It is the work of the creative to be a prosthetic imagination for the distracted and the dull”
– Maxwell Hubert Maxwell, playwright, butterfly collector, amateur surgeon and snob.