There is a strange pressure that arrives when a treatment finally works. Everybody is relieved, you are relieved, and suddenly the story is supposed to become simple: the bad chapter ended, the good chapter began, and now would be an excellent time for you to look appropriately grateful in the after photo.
My response to Vyalev has been extraordinary. After years of freezing, falling, medication roulette and organizing my day like a pharmaceutical air traffic controller, the pump gave me continuous movement again. I came off the pile of oral Parkinson’s medications, stopped falling and eventually turned off the DBS system that had been part of my life since 2008.
That is not a small improvement. It is the kind of change I once would have begged for without negotiating the fine print.
But getting better does not mean nothing bad happened.
The body may change faster than the mind knows how to follow. When you have spent years expecting the floor, the doorway or your own legs to betray you, one successful treatment does not immediately convince the nervous system to stop patrolling. Fear does not receive a software update just because your gait did.
I can move well and still remember what it felt like not to trust movement. I can go months without falling and still notice the places where I used to calculate how badly a fall might hurt. I can be deeply grateful for the life I have now without pretending the years before it disappeared into a cheerful medical montage.
Improvement changes the present. It does not travel backward and return the time, repair every relationship, erase every humiliating moment or reimburse the emotional cost of surviving until help arrived. Apparently, recovery has no retroactive billing department. I checked.
This is where people sometimes become impatient. If you are doing better, why are you still talking about what happened? If the treatment worked, why are you not simply moving forward? Because human beings are not Etch A Sketches. You do not shake us hard enough and expect the old lines to vanish.
Some of what looks like negativity is actually integration. The mind is trying to understand how the person who struggled for years belongs inside the person who can suddenly do more. It is learning that relief and grief can occupy the same body without either one being fraudulent.
I am allowed to celebrate what changed without minimizing what it took to get here. I am allowed to love the light and still tell the truth about the dark. Gratitude does not require amnesia.
That matters beyond Parkinson’s. People recover from surgery, depression, addiction, trauma, grief and countless private disasters, then discover that everyone around them is ready to close the file before they are. Function returns, so the world assumes the experience has been resolved.
Sometimes it has not been resolved. Sometimes it has simply stopped actively happening.
Healing is not proving that the wound was unimportant. It is learning how to live without giving the wound permanent authority over every decision that follows. That takes longer than a good test result, a working medication or the first morning your body finally cooperates.
TODAY’S DEFIANT TRUTH:
Getting better does not mean nothing bad happened.
Celebrate the improvement. Use the freedom. Walk through the door that finally opened. Just do not let anyone tell you the room behind you was imaginary because you are no longer trapped inside it.
The light is real. So was the dark.
Live Defiantly. — Richie Pikunis