Bah humbug

Thursday 16 December 2021

I don’t really like Christmas any more.

Writing cards, going shopping, wrapping presents, decorating the tree… all of them are, frankly, a pain in the neck, or, more literally, a pain in the hands. Everyday activities like getting dressed or grocery shopping are getting harder as it is without this burden of extra tasks requiring fine motor control.

I went to see my mother yesterday for a pre-Christmas gift-and-card-swapping visit and it was almost comical: mother and son, both with Parkinson’s, sitting on the floor trying to wrap a present for one of my brothers. We both fumbled for ages finding the end of the Sellotape, but eventually got a sort of system going. With trembling hands, she slowly folded the paper whilst I managed to stick the tape onto everything except the paper, and then eventually onto the paper itself. The end result wasn’t too bad but I have the distinct opinion that next year I need to be smarter: e-cards, or gift-wrapping services, or printed address labels or something. After all, it will only be harder in twelve months’ time.

We went for a short “walk” (shuffle might be a better word) near the house and played two games of scrabble and of course I gave her a back massage. It still amazes me how someone so thin and frail can have back muscles as hard as plywood. We even had a Parky power nap together – lying comatose side-by-side on the double bed in the spare room for ten minutes.

Despite our shared challenges, it was joyous to spend a few hours with her. As I departed into the cold darkness, I resolved to make the 7-8 hour round trip more often. She is lonely and craves human interaction, but she is also very much settled in her home and not keen to move, so I, and my siblings, need to travel to her.

When I returned home I looked at the pile of cards waiting to be written. It's sorely tempting to simply not bother.

Bah humbug. Yep, I no longer like Christmas.

Neuroscience week 1

Saturday 2 October 2021

The first week of the MSc course in neuroscience I am doing at King’s College London was quite a shock. I had been expecting a gentle introduction: some basics like “what is neuroscience” to lay a foundation, some admin, some meetings with tutors and the like.

There were a couple of introductory lectures on topics like brain anatomy and neuropathology but the rest of it was straight in at the deep end. Advanced topics like the pharmacology of glutamate and excitotoxicity, the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing method, and the physiology of microglia and oligodendrocytes. Below are some of the trickier slides presented to give you an idea.

 

It seems there is rather more assumed knowledge than I had bargained for and I have my work cut out to fill in the gaps. As for “what is neuroscience?”, that was our first essay, 500 words due in by midday on the first Friday. I’ve pasted my attempt below in case you’re interested.

It's also not been straightforward with the Parkinson’s, the main problem being the fatigue. I briefly fell asleep in one lecture, much to the speaker’s annoyance.

I was feeling concerned but then I also had some good extra-curricular conversations this week with people like the professor leading neurodegeneration research at Cambridge University and a leading researcher at Plymouth University. These conversations are are starting to give me ideas about a possible MSc project, and a research direction once I finish the degree. My thinking is not to try and become a neuroscientist, but rather to take a research problem where I can use my technology and data science skills and practical experience to make a difference. And one thing I learnt in the corporate world is that you can achieve so much more with a network of people than working solo.

So, despite feeling sometimes like my head was going to explode, and at other times like I was going to black out, I’m positive about the rest of the course.

Things get more interesting next week as we get to visit the “brain bank”, a room full of freezers storing samples from both healthy and diseased brains at -80 degrees. It’s certainly going to be a memorable year.

 

 

What is neuroscience?

 

neuroscience n. any or all of the scientific disciplines studying the nervous system and/or the mind and mental behaviour  (Landau, 1990)

This dictionary definition of neuroscience sounds simple but actually contains a number of elements that we need to unpick.

Firstly, neuroscience is a scientific discipline, meaning that it is a continuously evolving body of knowledge and practice which is underpinned by the scientific method. This requires that hypotheses are objectively assessed against real world observations and adopted, refined or discarded accordingly.

Secondly, it relates to the nervous system. In humans, this means the brain and spinal cord (the central nervous system) plus other nerve cells in the rest of the body (the peripheral nervous system) as summarised in Figure 1. Whilst most of the focus of neuroscience research is related to humans, it is worth noting that neuroscience can relate to any living organism with a nervous system, and this includes a wide range of vertebrate and invertebrate animals.

Thirdly, neuroscience encompasses not just the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system but also the more nebulous concepts of the mind and mental behaviour, including thorny topics like consciousness and intelligence.

Finally, neuroscience incorporates a number of sub-disciplines. The main clinical ones are shown in Table 1 (Bear, 2016).

Table 1 Clinical disciplines in neuroscience

Clinical discipline	Description
Neurology	Diagnosis and treatment of nervous system diseases
Psychiatry	Diagnosis and treatment of behavioural disorders
Neurosurgery	Surgery on the brain and spinal cord
Neuropathology	Understanding changes in the nervous system caused by disease

 

Figure 1. Elements of the human nervous system

In addition, there are many experimental specialisms from neuropharmacology to developmental neurobiology.

The term “neuroscience” is relatively new, though of course the brain and nervous system have been studied since antiquity.  For instance, according to Bear (2016), the Society for Neuroscience, a large association for professional neuroscientists was founded only in 1970.

A statement often made is that the human brain is the most complex object we have yet to encounter and, although neuroscience has made great progress in recent years at starting to understand its function at a molecular and cellular level, at a system level several fundamental questions have yet to be answered, including:

·         How does the brain give rise to consciousness?

·         What role does language play in human intelligence?

·         Why do animals with a nervous system need to sleep?

·         What causes certain disorders of the brain such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s Disease, and how can we prevent or cure them?

Neuroscience therefore is not only a fascinating subject, but also one that has the potential to make a large impact on humanity.

 

Bibliography

Landau, S. et al (editors) (1990). Chambers English Dictionary, 7^th edition. Edinburgh: W & R Chambers Ltd.

Bear, M., Connors, B., & Paradiso, M. (2016). Neuroscience: exploring the brain, 4^th edition, chapter 1. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer.

 

Fond farewell

Saturday 24 July 2021

They gave me a bottle of rather good whisky. And some vouchers for a distillery tour. A smart Mont Blanc pen and leather-bound notepad. A Samsonite laptop bag for my forthcoming time as a neuroscience student. And there was still several hundred pounds left over which I can put towards a holiday later in the year.

More important than the generosity of the leaving gifts was the generosity and warmth of the messages from colleagues in the room and on the video links. Apparently I was highly respected, an inspiration to my work colleagues, a role model, a great mentor.

They had gone to the trouble of hiring out the top floor auditorium for my retirement “celebration” and, as well as the live messages in the room, there were pre-recorded video messages from colleagues as far away as Hong Kong and, in a real surprise, as close to home as my own sitting room from where Clare reminisced about some of my travels around Europe over the previous nine years and cracked a few jokes about the cat.

I did a brief speech telling them, truthfully, that:

“All I ever tried to do was show up at work every day, do a professional job and, in some small way, try to leave things better than I found them. So I am truly touched and humbled to hear these words. I had no idea that I meant this much to people. Thank you.”

I said a few more words, then we hit the bar across the road from the office for a wonderful evening drinking and eating al fresco as the July sun slowly set over the backdrop of gleaming office buildings.

I expected it to be bitter sweet, anticipation of the future tinged with poignancy for the corporate world I will be departing forever in the next two weeks. But there was no sadness, no regret, no doubt, no melancholy as I said final farewells to work colleagues old and young.

I’ve made my decision and it’s time to move on. It’s time for me to shift from the passenger seat into the driving seat and steer in a new direction. The past is done; what matters now is making the most of the future.

Finding Happiness with Parkinson’s

Friday 11 June 2021

So I wrote a book based on this blog.

Despite penning 75,000 words, I couldn’t think of a snappy title, so I decided to call it simply what it’s about: Finding Happiness with Parkinson’s. You can find it on amazon.co.uk here and for other Amazon sites like amazon.com or amazon.ca, just search for the title.

Now approaching five years since diagnosis, I’m at a transition point in my life: soon to retire and take a leap into the new and fascinating world of neuroscience. I attended an introductory webinar to my forthcoming MSc course this week along with 50 other students from across the globe, and whilst the pre-reading list is a little daunting, I'm excited and I feel confident I’ve made the right decision.

More importantly, I feel like I’m finally in control and mentally prepared for the long haul, so now seemed like a natural time to bring the story together. Although the book is about 70% based on this blog, that still leaves 30% of new material. I hope it’s a worthwhile read.

Also, drum roll... I get to finally reveal my identity. As you can see from the book cover, I am not Steven or Steph, but Jodie Forbes and my wife is called Clare. Though all the other names, aside from the cat, remain anonymised.

For reasons I don't fully understand, the email subscription service used by this blog is being decommissioned next month. So, if you subscribe, this may well be the last post that you automatically get by email, but I'll endeavour to manually send out future posts to the current subscriber list.

Until then, enjoy the book if you decide to buy it. Profits will go to Parkinson's charities.

A leap into the unknown

Monday 5 April 2021
 
So I’ve decided to take the plunge. I applied to three MSc courses in London for the academic year starting in September 2021. Fairly quickly I got two unconditional offers, from King’s College and Birkbeck, plus an interview request for a bioinformatics course at Imperial College.
 
I decided that King’s was the better choice for a number of reasons. Firstly, the course I applied for there is a general foundation in neuroscience pitched at people of all backgrounds. Although I might end up doing bioinformatics, I think a general course will give me more options. Secondly, the research there is more aligned to what I would like to get into, particularly around study into neurodegeneration. And thirdly, the Denmark Hill campus where neuroscience is taught is only three miles from my home. Given that King’s is ranked around 15^th in the world for neuroscience and is almost on my doorstep, the decision to accept their offer was a no brainer (no pun intended), and I declined the other two.
 
And so, I have paid my deposit, told my boss I will be retiring at the end of August, and braced myself for the more frugal lifestyle I will have to adopt for the next three years until I can access my pension. I’ve been saving hard over the last decade or so, and can afford to stop work a few years early and pay for a Master’s – but only just.
 
I’m somewhat apprehensive. I will be packing in a job in which I am experienced and respected, and that pays well, and will be exchanging it to go back to being a student in my fifties. I will be the old guy in a lecture theatre full of twenty-somethings, struggling to keep up and to assimilate new concepts and remember new facts.
 
Having Parkinson’s will also make things difficult. I emailed the disability support group at King’s to inform them that I have two particular challenges. The first is that I more or less cannot write any more (though, when properly medicated I can still touch type fairly well). So when it comes to written exams, I will need a special exemption to be allowed to instead type my answers using a laptop. The second problem will be my ability to perform lab work – I assume one needs a steady hand to slice up a brain specimen, for example. I’ll just have to figure out how to manage on a case by case basis.
 
Will I even be able to pass the course, I wonder, let alone actually move into the sharp end of medical research at the end of it? Will I simply be too fatigued from the Parkinson’s to keep up?
 
I figure I’ve got nothing to lose. The worst case is that I don’t take it any further, but at least I will have spent my early retirement doing something new and interesting, rather than just playing online Scrabble and pottering in the garden.
 
I draw inspiration from the course video: “… the start of a fantastic journey where you will learn how the mind and brain works… the magic is to have students from all backgrounds and countries working together…”
 
I conclude that the best case is I really do embark on an incredible journey and, maybe, just maybe, in some small way, end up making a difference.
 
This is indeed a leap into the unknown. But it’s a leap worth taking.