Health Care

How many of you could identify the source of the title I selected for this post? If you said it is from the cult classic horror film Poltergiest II, you would have been correct. If you saw the movie, or even the ads or trailer, it was hard to forget the 8-year old child actress, Heather O’Rourke, holding a telephone receiver to her ear, and with a look of abject terror, screaming hysterically, “They’re baaaaack!”

Poltergiest in German mean “noisy ghost.” Traditionally, they are considered nuisance ghosts. They make strange noises and move things without really doing anything malevolent. They tended to concentrate their attacks on an individual instead of a location. In the three Poltergiest movies, the “they” were not the typical poltergiests. These poltergiests were malicious and viciously evil. However, they did seem to only concentrate their attacks on Carol Anne, the cute, young daughter of the Freeling family. Their presence in the first movie in the series, Poltergiest, was announced by Carol Anne with the equally well-used phrase, “They’re heeeere!” At the conclusion of the first movie, these evil ghosts were supposedly exercised from the lives of the Freeling family.

Anyone who follows the horror film genre knows that this pleasant thought was too good to be true. Horror film writers and directors can’t leave an innocent person or happy family alone. Most viewers easily identify with these type of characters. Thus, these victims make for a great story line and a successful film.

Early December, my poltergiests came “baaaack!” To revive another common phrase that I used in a previous post about a stubborn cat, “I thought they were gone, but they wouldn’t stay away.” My poltergiests are hallucinations and cross-sensory perceptions. For several years, I have fought with medical professionals about the term hallucinations.

Soon after my series of tonic-clonic seizures and the onset of my epilepsy, I started sensing things that I knew were not real. For example, even when I knew the wall opposite me was absolutely fixed in place, I occasionally “saw” it speeding toward me. I also knew that there was not a tiny igloo on the plain shower curtain in our bathroom. I definitely knew there was not a tiny Eskimo living in that igloo. In addition, I absolutely knew that the little Eskimo was not acting like the cuckoo of a cuckoo clock, popping in and out of the igloo regularly.

If I knew something wasn’t real, how could I label that a hallucination? However, to be able to communicate with medical professionals on their terms, I finally had to acquiesce and call my unusual perceptions hallucinations.

However, my cross-sensory perceptions are a horse-of-another color. My medical professionals do not know what to call them since they don’t fit the classical scientific definitions of dysaesthesia or synesthesia. With my cross-sensory perceptions, I am receiving sensory stimuli through the normal sensory receptors, but my brain is translating those signals into something else. For example,with musical instruments, I can hear wind instruments and horns normally. However, I do not hear string instruments. I either feel vibrations or I see images of oscilloscope waves or amplifier lights. Even though I don’t hear the music from the organ in our church, I can identify old familiar hymns from the vibrations or visual perceptions. In the past six months I have only “heard” the music from the organ once. That one occasion was the Sunday morning, the organist used a flute register to play one hymn. I believe I heard the organ that day because it sounded like a flute.

Eight months ago, my neurological and cardio-vascular medical teams got together to discuss changes in my medications that might possibly reduce my tremors, hallucinations and cross-sensory perceptions. The changes that they made seemed to have some positive effects through the late summer and early fall months.

However, Thanksgiving was a very stressful time in our family. The Saturday before Thanksgiving was the wedding of the youngest daughter of my wife’s deceased sister. The joy of the weekend was shattered when the wife of my wife’s younger brother died suddenly the day before the wedding. The funeral service for our sister-in-law was held the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Soon after Thanksgiving, the hallucinations started up again. In addition, the cross-sensory perceptions increased in frequency and diversity, and my tremors increased in frequency and intensity. I still didn’t want to call my unusual perceptions hallucinations because I knew they weren’t real, until…they progressed to teh point where I wasn’t sure whether they were real or not. I would see something on the desk or table and when I reached to pick it up, nothing was there. I would see an animal run across the road. When I asked my wife about it, she would say there was no animal. She would suggest that I probably saw a piece of paper or trash blowing across the road. I would see birds flying past the car. My wife would say that she only saw a leaf blowing in the wind.

One of the cross-sensory perceptions to which I had become accustomed was one in which, instead of smelling the odor of a skunk, I would see the image of a dead skunk along the side of some road, even when there was no dead skunk or road anywhere in sight. However, one time I actually did see a dead skunk before I had the vision of a dead skunk. When I saw the skunk, I started smelling the distinctive odor of a skunk. When I asked my wife if she smelled the skunk, she said, “No.” She saw the skunk also and was surprised that there was no odor coming from this dead skunk.

So now “They’re baaaaack!” and they really are hallucinations. In talking with my medical team, they are considering the possibility of making more changes in my medications. I suppose this is why they call it, “Practicing medicine.”