A few days
ago, my wife was driving us back from the grocery store, when I
noticed that we were about to pass an old man—younger than I am, to be sure—who
was riding a bicycle. He had on a blue shirt and a white helmet. Since he was ahead
of us, I didn’t see his face, nor did I turn around after we had gone on. How
did I know he was old? He was moving quite slowly and was hunched over his
means of transportation. I couldn’t be sure of his age, but the impression was
of a man who bicycled with difficulty. More power to him, I thought. “Why
didn’t you slow down as you usually do, and let the old man pass?” I asked. "Passing him at normal speed increases the chance of a serious accident."
Her reply,
which I will soon divulge, startled me greatly.
That night
I was assiduously working at the computer, typing something or other into
Microsoft Word. After some time, I noticed from the corner of my eye a mouse,
which darted from the living room incredibly fast, then vanished underneath my desk. We had a few mice during
spring; this was not anything unusual, except for the speed of the little
critter. I resumed work and, when finished, noticed the mouse again, this time darting from beneath the desk back out into the living room. The mouse must have been doing aerobics for
some time, for it, again, was incredibly fast. But something was strange. The
mouse headed straight across the living room where I quickly lost sight of it. It
didn’t take cover behind the radiator or hide under a bookshelf, as I would
have expected. Even stranger, the mouse must have been a student of Zeno. It
never managed to outrun itself. I was left with a series of murine images \\darting into
the living room, much like stills of a silent film. This was really weird, but
I laughed it off. “Perhaps I’m about to be visited by the Ghost of Christmas
Past,” I thought, and got up to go to bed. Before I reached the stairs that
lead to the bedroom, I saw my beloved cat, Gopi, resting on a couch. His head
was lowered slightly; he didn’t look up at me, but I could tell he knew I was
there. He had a sour expression that
conveyed, “He’s about to pick me up, and I don’t want to be picked up.” Cats
will be cats, I thought, and proceeded up the stairs.
The time has come to answer the question about the man on the
bike. My wife didn’t slow down, because, she told me, there was no man and no
bike. “You were seeing things again,’” she said. Similarly, the darting mouse
was an illusion as well. And, as I turned off the light, I realized, as I lay in bed, that Gopi
had been dead for several years.
Hallucinations
are not at all a rare manifestation of Parkinson’s Disease. Here is what a
reliable site has to say about it:
Among
people with PD, visual hallucinations are most common, often of people or animals. They tend to be vividly colored and to happen at
night. Usually they are not frightening and can become familiar. For example, a
person might regularly hallucinate a puppy with a red collar.
That sums up my situation nicely. The old man had on a bright blue shirt;
the mouse was a vivid dark-brown, and Gopi lay there with black
and white fur; a loveable cat, just as he had been in life. I wasn’t
frightened at all.
I read somewhere that Parkinsonian hallucinations are indicative of a
more serious prognosis. Let’s hope that that had been an illusion as
well!
No comments:
Post a Comment