Oliver Sacks

       More Letters From Paradise
         Oliver Sacks and Me

Oliver Sacks is dead! The name Oliver Sacks may not be a household word. He was born July 9, 1933, and died of terminal cancer in his Greenwich Village New York home, August 30, 2015. He was the world renowned neurologist, author, and professor of neurology at New York University of Medicine.

His name may not be familiar, but the motion picture "Awakenings," filmed in 1990, starring Robin Williams, Robert DeNiro, Julie Kavner, and Ruth Nelson was based upon a famous neurological clinical study made by Dr. Sacks.

Shortly following World War I, there was a great epidemic of sleeping sickness, and some few survivors became frozen in sleep for decades! Dr. Sacks gave them a new drug LDOPA, and they were brought back from the past into a strange new world.

All the details can be found in his book "Awakenings," available from Amazon. Another famous book has the very odd title "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For His Hat." Also purchased from Amazon.

Oliver Sacks was more than a neurologist and author. He rode a BMW motorcycle, lifted weights (600 lbs.a record ) and swam every day.

Why am I so interested in Dr. Sacks, the neurologist? It is because I am being treated by Dr. Eliza Hagen, another neurologist. There is nothing like having a brain seizure to cause one to become interested in neurology. Following a ten hour brain operation, Dr. Lee, a South Korean near surgeon planted 68 platinum coils in my brain. Dr. Hagen has me on what we  call a "Five Year Plan," and Teena  and I agree that "If it's not broken, don't fix it ".   I have been seizure-free for two and a half years, but still on medication twice a day. The early days following my seizure were pure hell. One of the side-effects of one medicine was thoughts of suicide! I had never even thought of suicide. And we live on the 30th floor! But things got righted out, and it's all good. Scared the hell out of us! All good now so far.

      Aloha
      Grant