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Expressions of love: 'Your Wildest Dreams' brings a debilitating illness 'into perspective'
Michelle Terrill Heath’s book “Your Wildest Dreams: A Parkinson’s Love Story” is told from the perspectives of the author as wife, mother, friend, perceptive memoirist and long-term caregiver.
For 21 years Michelle has been the primary caregiver for her husband, Andy, who’s been dealing with Parkinson’s disease and its debilitating symptoms.
The book paints a picture of Michelle’s empathy and compassion — and sometimes arduous physical labor — in giving that care.
“What I try to say in my book is that disease is part of our life. Sickness needs to be put into perspective,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Taos.
The book also shows the open mind she and Andy have possessed in seeking treatment from multiple sources.
Indeed, Michelle and Andy have spent years investigating a raft of prescription drugs and alternative treatments to try to figure out what did and didn’t help Andy’s Parkinson’s disease and symptoms.
“I share how we found our way through sickness and into wellness,” Michelle writes.
She writes in great detail the multiple treatments Andy received in 2010 from an ayurvedic doctor they befriended in India on a previous trip.
The treatments included physical exercises, meditations, mantras, visualizing positive images and yoga. Supplementing this routine were ayurvedic treatments of shirodhara (oil dripping) massage, basti (enema), and three meals a day.
Besides the meals, Andy had to take a tablespoon of ghee when he awoke in the morning and drank two herbal medicine powders in separate mixtures. Michelle prepared and delivered those mixtures to Andy.
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The oil treatment was hard on Michelle. She described soaping and washing Andy’s body with hot water three times a day in a shower. Even after showering, “there was residue on Andy’s skin and black flies tortured him,” Michelle writes.
She also had to spoon-feed Andy.
(Earlier in the same chapter Michelle observes that the person spoon-feeding an adult must rise above the notion of helping the helpless and “move into a higher level of understanding so that spoon-feeding becomes an act of respect and grace.”)
On the same trip to India, Andy followed a physical regimen prescribed by the same doctor “designed to reopen channels in his brain that weren’t functioning well,” Michelle writes.
The experiment with the ayurvedic treatments failed.
What eventually did work for Andy was a surgical procedure called deep brain stimulation. In 2013, he became a candidate for DBS and would have the surgery at the Veterans Administration hospital in West Los Angeles.
That same year, the home they were building in Taos was ready for them to move in. They had been living in what Michelle called — and Andy constructed — a housetruck. The house was attached to what had been a retired water truck from Alcalde.
Woven into the text are Michelle’s observations about their life of adventure — before and after children — and the kindness of friends they made along the way.
The book is filled with expressions of love — the love that Michelle and Andy have for each other and the love for their family and friends.
They had initially met in Aspen, Colorado. The next summer they traveled in Andy’s Porsche and camped through the West. They lived together on Santa Catalina Island, off the California coast.
Michelle tried pursuing acting studies in London but gave it up to be with Andy. “This man had become a person I couldn’t imagine living without,” she writes.
Back on Catalina, Michelle accepted an offer to be an assistant to a friend starting a bronze jewelry-making business. Fashioning bronze jewelry and selling it at art shows became a long-lasting occupation for her. She also worked for years as a massage therapist.
The book suffers from the chapters jumping back and forth in time.
For example, the opening chapter is about events in 2015. The next two chapters are in the 1970s. That’s followed by a chapter in the mid-2000s and back to the early 1980s.
