Read Online Vintage Sacks by Oliver Sacks - Free Book Online Page A

ten days of August, Miss R. seemed to be totally blocked in all spheres of activity; everything about her showed an extremity of tension, which was entirely prevented from finding any outlet. Her face at this time was continually clenched in a horrified, tortured, and anguished expression. Her prediction of a month earlier was completely fulfilled: something awful
had
come, and it was as bad as they came.
    1969–72
    Miss R.’s reactions to L-DOPA since the summer of 1969 have been almost nonexistent compared with her dramatic initial reaction. She has been placed on L-DOPA five further times, each with an increase of dose by degrees to about 3.0 gm. per day. Each time the L-DOPA has procured
some
reduction in her rigidity, oculogyria, and general entrancement, but less and less on each succeeding occasion. It has
never
called forth anything resembling the amazing mobility and mood change of July 1969, and in particular has never recalled the extraordinary sense of 1926-ness which she had at that time. When Miss R. has been on L-DOPA for several weeks its advantages invariably become overweighed by its disadvantages, and she returns to a state of intense “block,” crises, and tic-like impulsions. The form of her tics has varied a good deal on different occasions: in one of her periods on L-DOPA her crises were always accompanied by a palilalic verbigeration of the word “Honeybunch!” which she would repeat twenty or thirty times a minute for the entire day.
    However deep and strange her pathological state, Miss R. can invariably be “awakened” for a few seconds or minutes by external stimuli, although she is obviously quite unable to generate any such stimuli or calls-to-action for herself. If Miss A.—a fellow patient with dipsomania—drinks more than twenty times an hour at the water fountain, Miss R. cries, “Get away from that fountain, Margaret, or I’ll clobber you!” or “Stop sucking that spout, Margaret, we all know what you really want to suck!” Whenever she hears my name being paged she yells out, “Dr. Sacks! Dr. Sacks!! They’re after you again!” and continues to yell this until I have answered the page.
    Miss R. is at her best when she is visited—as she frequently is—by any of her devoted family who fly in from all over the country to see her. At such time she is all agog with excitement, her blank masked face cracks into a smile, and she shows a great hunger for family gossip, though no interest at all in political events or other current “news”; at such times she is able to say a certain amount quite intelligibly, and in particular shows her fondness for jokes and mildly salacious indiscretions. Seeing Miss R. at this time one realizes what a “normal” and charming and alive personality is imprisoned or suspended by her ridiculous disease.
    On a number of occasions I have asked Miss R. about the strange “nostalgia” which she showed in July 1969, and how she experiences the world generally. She usually becomes distressed and “blocked” when I ask such questions, but on a few occasions she has given me enough information for me to perceive the almost incredible truth about her. She indicates that in her “nostalgic” state she
knew
perfectly well that it was 1969 and that she was sixty-four years old, but that she
felt
that it was 1926 and she was twenty-one; she adds that she can’t really imagine what it’s like being older than twenty-one, because she has never really experienced it. For most of the time, however, there is “nothing, absolutely nothing, no thoughts at all” in her head, as if she is forced to block off an intolerable and insoluble anachronism—the almost half-century gap between her age as felt and experienced (her
ontological
age) and her actual or official age. It seems, in retrospect, as if the L-DOPA must have “de-blocked” her for