it s not quite where he wants it to be. but he s inching toward it. and today brent is going in for what doctors think is his final adjustment. off to see the wizard. how long did it take you to get to the car this morning? it was brief. a few seconds. and before the surgery how long would it take sometimes? do you want me to say it or do you? okay. i mean, sometimes it would take hours. normal activities, conversing, relating, feeling unstuck, they re all getting easier. i feel like i m getting a little better hillary clinton, you know, every day a little bit. normal. it was so fleeting for decades. but it s now creeping back into brent larsen s life. before i had the surge ril, i
he s still that goofy kid. and there are moments when he s free enough of anxiety that he can express that. but it s only moments. it s not days. it s not hours. it s it s not enough. this, his doctors believe, is both his best and last hope. deep brain stimulation or dbs. how are you feeling right fowl, brent? i feel happy. foal happeel happy? to short-circuit the signals that cause so much fear and anxiety. he became really happy. his mood was really elevated. he was talking a lot better. i feel like laughing for some reason. you feel like laughing? that s good. we want to know when you re having those feelings, tell us. later when the electrodes are
i just got the thought in my head, if i flip the light switch off and on a certain amount of times maybe i could control it somehow. at 12 brent was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, ocd. imagine a broken record and you have a sense about his life. on a typical day a shower can take 45 minutes. getting dressed even longer. putting on his shoes. it could take hours. he ll put them on and take them off and turn them around. think of ocd as a neurological hick couple, faulty wiring in the brain. it spills over into brent s speech. someone wants to have a normal life, a better life. years of therapy, medication, even hospitalization didn t help. i know that brent has a lot of normal in him.
turned on with a continuous electrical current, his doctors are betting his neurological hiccups will be fixed. hi, brent, how are you doing? pretty good, how are you? thanks for coming. oh, sure. just a few weeks now since his operation and brent is having the electrodes implanted in his brain turned on. you feel any changes, any extreme sensations anywhere? i feel like laughing like in surgery. but it will take several months and several adjustments to the electrical current for brent to find out if those feelings will last. i am going to be looking at you all night. a few months later, progress. it s up and it s down. the level oit been a week or so, i might have a hard time for a little while but then it gets better.
experimental treatment, and in one case we saw it take effect right in front of our eyes. we had friendships and he was funny and goofy and spontaneous and loud. he was normal. normal. a life filled with hope and possibility would not last long for brett larsen. the change began when brent was 10. his father had died. he was virtually mute for a year. he did not speak at all. i didn t understand it at all. none of us did. but this was not typical grieving. it was full-blown anxiety. so brent s brain began conco concocting unusual coping mechanisms. i get a bad thought like someone s going to die.