Early in the morning on August 22, 2022, Jon’s medical team told him that neurologist Helen Mayberg would check in with him just before his deep brain stimulation surgery. “Everybody is like, ‘Dr. Mayberg is going to come in and give you a pumped-up speech.’” She’d explain how everything ought to go and what the team needed from Jon. She didn’t disappoint, Jon says. “She came in and gave me the pep talk: ‘All I need you to do is to be present,’” she told him. “She was really adamant about that.”
“I’m just busting her chops, and she’s sitting there laughing. But that’s how completely normal you are.”
The day after surgery, Jon sat with Mayberg and another clinician as they began to turn on and off electrodes, searching for the pattern of stimulation that would influence nerve cells in the right way and in the right spot. Each time, Mayberg would ask him two key questions: Did he feel like walking his dog? And did he want to have friends over to sit around his fire pit? Jon’s wife, Barbara, his dad and a crowd of doctors and researchers watched a video feed of this process from an overflow room.
After trying a series of stimulation patterns and getting “yes” to their questions, the researchers settled on an electrical pattern, and Jon went home to Pennsylvania. “The next day, bandaged up on my head, I not only took the dog on a walk, I asked my son and my wife to come with me. I enjoyed the walk. I enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed coming back home. I sat outside and had coffee. It’s just surreal.”
2023-09-21 08:35:35
Post from www.sciencenews.org
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