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Talking Head TV Producer
With Parkinson's Narrates His Way Through His Own Brain Surgery ABCNEWS.com
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Farkas, an Emmy award-winning television producer, was diagnosed
with the disease in May 2000. For three years, the symptoms were relatively
mild — just a little shaking, some tremors in his left leg that he blamed on
too much tennis, some mild slowness and some balance problems. He found that
he was losing tennis games to opponents he used to beat. But at the
beginning of last year, the symptoms suddenly worsened. The trembling
increased and spread to his left arm and right leg. He slowed down
noticeably, was stiffer, and his family saw his face become less expressive —
a symptom known as the Parkinson's mask. It all
crystallized for him at a TV conference in Surgery,
Not Pills Having seen
what happened to his father, Farkas knew what he didn't want to do.
Farkas' father took levadopa, an early form of the
drugs that are now widely prescribed for Parkinson's. The pills gave him
terrible side effects such as hallucinations (he would snatch at imaginary
things in the air around him) and jerky movements known as dyskenesia. Ultimately he was bed-ridden and slowly declined.
Farkas knew
he didn't want the pills, and he had heard about an alternative known as Deep
Brain Stimulation (DBS). The surgical procedure was approved by the FDA last
year to treat Parkinson's symptoms, though it is not a cure for the
underlying disease. In the
procedure, two electrodes are implanted deep inside the brain. The
electrodes, powered by batteries placed in the patient's chest,
function a little like a pacemaker for the heart, using electrical
stimulation to interrupt the abnormal firing of neurons that cause the
symptoms of Parkinsons's: tremors, slowness,
stiffness, and sometimes depression and hallucinations. The patient
remains awake during the procedure, so he can provide feedback to the surgeon
about the effect various electric impulses are having on his nervous system. Doctors at Cameras
Rolling
Being a TV
producer, Farkas decided to document the surgery — especially because he
would be awake. "It seemed to me like a slam dunk," he says of his
decision to film the operation and narrate it himself. Kalhorn and
the hospital staff were enthusiastic about the idea, so Farkas asked some
colleagues — including his two oldest sons, Mark and Danny — to man the
cameras. "They didn't flinch — even though they would be filming their
old man's brain operation," he says. Thinking
about the filming helped distract Farkas from the seriousness of what he was
going to go through. "It hardly occurred to me they were going to be
drilling in my head," he says. When he walked into the hospital on the
morning of the surgery, the first thing he asked was whether the cameras were
in position. Farkas kept
on directing even after Kalhorn opened a hole in his head the size of a
quarter and inserted the electrodes. During the
eight-hour procedure, Farkas gave the doctors feedback. When each electrode,
in turn, reached the sweet spot — the sub-thalamic nucleus (STN) — and the
current was turned on, he told Kalhorn he felt a "cool, peaceful"
feeling and that his tremors seemed to quiet. Kalhorn knew they had
succeeded. At the same
time, Farkas provided narration for the film — as well as a steady stream of
bad jokes — and gave pointers to his crew. "Dr. Kalhorn was actually
inside my head while I was trying to direct the shoot." He felt no
pain throughout the procedure. Now, five
months later, Farkas says he is "back pretty much to my pre-Parkinson's
self." His major symptoms — tremors, stiffness and rigidity — have
virtually disappeared, though his balance is still off, as the doctors warned
him. But he's working on that with physical therapy and is back on the tennis
courts. He is working
on a full-length documentary about the procedure, which he plans to call It
Ain't Television — It's Brain Surgery. The film
will feature specially written songs called "DBS Tango" and "Gotta Get a Hole in the Head," with lines like
"You don't need to shake my hand — it shakes on its own just fine."
And when the
film is done, Farkas says, he plans "to live a full life … doing all the
things I used to do, including a surprise or two for those guys who started
to beat me at tennis." For more information on DBA and Parkinson's, go to Farkas'
Web site at www.offcentertv.com. The site
features a list of DBS resources, as well as additional video of the medical
procedure and 12 other Farkas productions. |