The Tenth Nerve by Dr. Chris Honey

Author:Dr. Chris Honey [Honey, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2022-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

8.

THE CURE

There was a brief moment of congratulations after Emily’s operation, but little more than the acknowledgement of another successful brain surgery. Hours later, sitting at my office desk, looking out the window at Vancouver’s lights, I wondered, What the hell did I just find?

The unique juxtaposition of Emily’s vagus nerve and her posterior inferior cerebellar artery explained her unusual symptoms. The surgery to correct it was, thankfully, completed without complication. It remained to be seen whether her problem was solved, but I felt confident about the outcome.

And now the ramifications of what I had seen began to sink in. There must be hundreds of people with Emily’s problem. Maybe thousands? This was the recognition of a new disease.

Then the doubts flooded in. How would I convince my colleagues this disease even existed? Why had it not been described before? How would I find these patients? Maybe this disease had been described before under another name. And if it hadn’t, what name was I going to give it?

The naming of a new medical condition has changed styles over the years. Historically the disease might be given the name of the physician who discovered it or the place where it was discovered. James Parkinson (1755–1824) is the source of the name for Parkinson’s disease, which he first wrote about in 1817. More recently, researchers use universal terms to describe new conditions. I would get to name this condition because I had discovered it.

The World Health Organization has put out guidelines for naming new human diseases (that I had not yet read at the time). They recommend that new human diseases not include place names (e.g., Spanish flu, German measles, or Wuhan virus) because it could engender racism. Some are still named for places—Ebola is a river in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Lyme is a town in Connecticut. The WHO also does not like people’s names, specific animals or scary adjectives associated with a disease.

Prion diseases, the world’s most lethal diseases, with no cure and a 100 percent death rate, are a group that include fatal familial insomnia, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, kuru and mad cow disease. They break all the rules of naming. To be given the diagnosis of fatal familial insomnia must be truly frightening. Only kuru might be acceptable to the WHO, although the questionable circumstances around its discovery were certainly not. Kuru is the Fore word “to shake,” one of the symptoms that preceded death in this isolated tribe in Papua New Guinea. The researcher who discovered the disease deduced that it was transmitted by the cannibalistic ritual of eating the brains of your dead enemies or relatives. He was lauded as a Nobel laureate but later reviled as an unrepentant pedophile. The mad cow disease outbreak in England had a similar mode of transmission, through animal feed contaminated with the brains of the beasts’ fallen brethren.

Originally, I had looked for patients with unilateral contractions of their throat (choking). If a vessel pressing on the facial nerve could

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