I’ve written about this in one of previous posts, but this time it is more severe.
Last night I’ve experienced another recovery symptom – frequent urination.
Usually I go to toilet during a night 3-4 times. Last night I went to the toilet 8 times, practically every hour. According to dr. JWH book RFP 2020 this is a recovery symptom.
This is a text from her book on this subject:
At about the same time that a recovering patient experiences small-of-the-back
soreness, he may feel drastic changes in his sensitivity to bladder signals.
In his youth, the pre-Parkinson’s patient may have had powerful bladder control.
He may have been able to go all day without feeling a need to urinate. This was not
because he had a “strong” bladder. In these patients, this lack of “need” to urinate
occurred because the bladder nerves were somewhat numb. Only the very strongest
signals from a very overstretched bladder could generate a strong enough signal to get
through the relatively numb area in the low-ish back, near where the bladder nerves enter
the spine. The feeble bit of signal that got through to the spine and then traveled to the
brain was all the person might have gotten, even if the bladder was actually saying “I’m
really overstretched down here.”
Oppositely, some people, in the decades prior to manifesting Parkinson’s, have
extremely “weak” bladders: they must urinate every hour or so. The problem is one and
the same: the signals to and from the bladder – signals that travel through the area of the
low back, and which should be regulated by the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous
systems – are not running at full capacity.
When an animal is highly dissociated or on pause from a high degree of trauma,
when he is behaving as if dead, the animal might not register signals from the bladder. He
might find himself unable to hold his urine or, oppositely, he may find that most of a day
goes by before he feels the need to urinate.
One elderly patient told me how, during World War II, his buddies highly
resented his ability to stay in a trench all day. He never felt any urgency to urinate more
than twice a day. The other soldiers had to leave the safety of the trenches every few hours
in order to use the latrine trenches, thus exposing themselves to risk.
I heard many fascinating bladder stories, and other health stories, that all helped
me put together a very full and three-dimensional picture of Parkinson’s disease. Our
modern system of medicine, in which a neurologist sees a patient for a quick fifteen
minutes, twice a year, almost guarantees that doctors will not be able to make the
connections between seemingly unrelated symptoms: connections that, in my research, led
to a much deeper understanding of the physiological changes that can accompany
Parkinson’s disease.
The combination of pause and/or the lack of flow in UB channel qi in the small of
the back may have been the cause or at least contributed to the somewhat common, lifetime bladder irregularities of people with Parkinson’s disease.
As the spinal nerves of the low back begin to be invigorated, at about the same
time that the back soreness begins, the adjacent nerves from the bladder also begin to
resume healthy sensitivity.
During the decades that the Parkinson’s was silently worsening, the patient’s brain
had, in many cases, become accustomed to a very low signal from the bladder nerves.
Because the “fullness” nerves from the bladder (the stretch receptor nerves) had barely
gotten any signal through to the brain, the brain had slowly trained itself to respond to the
least little signal, if any, from the bladder. The brain learned that even the smallest signal
from these nerves indicated a very full bladder.
Some patients, prior to recovery, got few or no bladder signals during the day,
until the bladder was horribly full. The only time they felt genuine bladder fullness might
be at the first urination of the morning. A few had trained themselves to urinate at regular
intervals – every three or four hours – regardless of whether or not they felt any urgency.
But even so, sometimes, they got home from work at the end of a long day and, as they
noticed how much urine was passing, said to themselves, “Huh. Looks like I forgot to use
the toilet when I was at work today. Again.”
In my research, I only thought to ask my PD patients about this because
“forgetting to urinate” was one of the symptoms on my personal long list of “things that
are unique about me.” Turns out, I wasn’t so unique.
In recovering patients, as the bladder-signal nerves begin to revive from their
partial dormancy, they began sending healthier, more vigorous signals. The brain,
accustomed to a tiny nerve signal, misinterprets these healthy, larger signals: it assumes
that extreme bladder stretching must be occurring. When the recovering patient’s brain
starts receiving what seems like massive, steady surges of bladder information, the brain’s
response is to assume that the bladder is constantly, painfully full.
There is actually no fullness pain in the bladder. The sensation of bladder fullness
is a purely mental response. It occurs in the brain. During recovery, the feeling of urgency
is a brain response to the new, healthy intensity of the bladder’s stretch receptor nerves.
They send a mild, healthy, normal, signal up to the brain when the bladder is empty, as
they should. They send a really strong, vigorous signal when the bladder is full.
Eventually, recovering patients’ brains recalibrate their responses to the healthy
bladder signals. But until then, while the brain is still overwhelmed by the new, mild,
healthy nerve signals from the bladder, some recovering patients felt the “urgency to
urinate” signal getting triggered every few minutes. This was very frustrating, because the
amount of urine passed each time in response to the panic call could be measured in
teaspoons, or even droplets. Nevertheless, the brain signals were adamant.
The recalibration of the bladder-urgency signals occurs over a few days, a few
weeks, or a few months. Just as the increased sensitivity and awareness of a previously
numb foot tapers off when the brain accommodates to it, the increased sensitivity to the
bladder signals tapers off over time.
God bless!