PORT ANGELES — A week after deep brain stimulation — DBS — surgery, Charmaigne Dunscomb is on a kind of honeymoon.
Dunscomb on Aug. 23 underwent DBS at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, nine years after she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
In an operation involving only local anesthetic, DBS veteran Dr. Ronald Young ran a wire from her subthalamic nucleus — part of the basal ganglia — under her skin to a battery pack just inside her chest wall.
She spent the night at Swedish in the intensive-care unit, then came home to Port Angeles the next day, accompanied by an entourage that included her husband, Ward, two daughters, a son and her best friend, Irene Metcalf.
On Wednesday, she attended the Parkinson’s disease support group at Olympic Medical Center, where her former neurologist, Dr. John W. Roberts, was a guest speaker.
“He was so happy to see me; I could see him just beaming,” Dunscomb said of Roberts, who spoke on the past and future of Parkinson’s treatment.
At that meeting and every day since word got out about her surgery, Dunscomb has been showered with phone calls. Some have come from people she had not heard from in years — and all were welcome.
“I can’t tell you how good it feels,” she said.
“It’s like a warm blanket” to hear from people she’s worked with, from her paying job at Albertsons to her volunteer work at the Puget Sound Blood Bank.
Dunscomb’s operation, however, took nearly twice as long as the expected 90 minutes. She suffered some nausea in the middle of it, and then a suction tube brought on a stubborn coughing spasm.
One can’t be coughing and moving around during brain surgery, so she and Young had to wait it out.
But once the wire and battery were placed, it was time to gauge the amount of electricity needed to properly treat the area of Dunscomb’s brain affected by Parkinson’s.
“They woke me, and said, ‘Move your hands, your legs, your arms.’ I could do all those things. And I could smile and scrunch up my face and look ugly,” she said.
“I moved just like a normal person.”
Dunscomb could also read the screen in the operating room, which showed the electrical wavelength that was just right: 4865 were the numbers that stick in her mind.
For years Dunscomb has taken carbidopa-levidopa, a medication well-known to people with Parkinson’s — but its potency has withered.
Before last week’s surgery, her symptoms — tremors, severe tension, depression — were barely responding to her prescription.
But now, “I’m having a honeymoon. The pills are working for longer,” she said last Friday.
The electricity that will stimulate the diseased part of her brain, however, isn’t on yet.
This period of relief is common among DBS patients. It might be thanks to the mere implantation of the wire; the reasons aren’t fully understood, Dunscomb said.
She’s feeling bruised and uncomfortable, though, from the implantation of the battery below her collarbone and the halo used to brace her head during the surgery.
Yet as she has been since her Parkinson’s diagnosis in summer 2001, Dunscomb is surrounded by her close friends and family.
Along with her husband, Ward, her daughters, Linda Cameron and Sandi Roberson, and her son, Richard Townsend, traveled with her to Seattle.
And Cameron, a few days before, had her head shaved in solidarity with her mother.
“What I want to emphasize in this,” said Dunscomb, “are the caretakers. The husbands, the mothers and fathers, the kids who take care of their parents. They are such valuable, sometimes overlooked people” when a loved one undergoes a major surgery.
“Sometimes it’s harder on them than on than on the patient.”
Waiting outside the operating room, Cameron was frightened. It didn’t help when the procedure stretched to three hours.
But before, during and after, Cameron strove to be like her mom — determined to cultivate a positive outlook.
“I didn’t let myself get emotional about it,” Cameron added, “until people came up to me at work,” at Jim’s Pharmacy in Port Angeles.
Cameron works in the gift department and has lately been showered with good wishes from customers who read about Dunscomb in Aug. 23’s Peninsula Daily News.
And since Cameron shaved her head, she’s been amazed at how many people tell her their own stories of coping with cancer or other health problems.
“When she was first diagnosed, we were all devastated,” Cameron said of her family.
But Dunscomb’s courage, and her determination to keep seeing friends, keep exercising and then to undergo DBS, kept them hopeful.
“I haven’t seen anything but positive come out of this,” Cameron added.
In a few weeks, Dunscomb will travel to the Booth Gardner Center in Kirkland to have her battery pack switched on.
It will be done with a remote control device, she said, similar to what’s used to turn on an electric stove.
“Then they fine-tune the voltage, in weekly visits for six months,” Dunscomb added.
That outpatient procedure won’t, of course, be as daunting as her brain surgery.
“Having it over with,” Dunscomb said, “is taking my attitude sky high.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.