When I was a kid I could never wear a watch. My mother bought me a watch one day. I was so excited. I put it on immediately. I now could see what time it was whenever I wanted to. The fun lasted about two weeks. Then my watch stopped. I had been remembering to wind it up. But when I wound it up this time, nothing!

I showed the watch to my mother. She of course thought I had broken it somehow. She tried fiddling with it. Nothing. “I will take it back to the store where I purchased it.” she said.
A few days later she came into my room with a new watch. “Now be careful with it this time!”
Careful -schmareful. I was careful. It just stopped.

I wore it to school the next day. Three weeks later, guess what? This one stopped working as well. This happened with about eight different watches. My mother gave up. I didn’t wear another watch for about 8 years. Then one day when I was a teenager, I decided to try buying a watch again. I bought a cute watch and wore it home. I figured maybe they were making them better now. This one lasted about 2 months. I was at the mall one day, my watch now in my purse. I found a store that fixed watches while you wait. I strolled in and went up to the counter. The watchmaker came over and greeted me. He had a name tag on that read Phil.
I began to explain my dilemma to Phil. I reached into my purse and put the watch on a pad that he had on the counter. “I have never been able to wear a watch that would work on me for more than a month or two.” Phil listened intently. I told him about the watches when I was a kid, and I pointed to the one on the pad. “I decided to give it a go again but the same thing happened.”

A sly smile spread across Phil’s face. He reached for some of his watchmakers tools.
“I am going to show you why your watches never work for very long, little lady.” He began by taking the backing off of my watch. I was on pins and needles as he took all the workings of the watch out. He spread them across the pad. He looked at me and said… “Now watch.”
He took two screwdrivers and pushed the pieces slowly towards the center of the pad. I watched and waited and suddenly all the pieces acted like magnets and slid together into a heap at the center of the pad. I thought Phil was playing a trick on me. But as I picked up one of the inner pieces of the watch, all the pieces came with it. I was speechless! And that’s something that doesn’t happen very often.

Phil broke the silence. “You see little lady, you are one of the small percentage of the population that because of the electrical makeup of their body, magnetize the inner workings of watches. They can’t work because they are all sticking to one another. That’s what was happening inside your watch.” I was mesmerized by the pile of magnetized pieces hanging in front of me.

Flash forward too many years more than I would like to admit. I am sitting in my general doctors office and he asks me how my symptoms have been lately. I spill the beans about how much of a roller coaster it’s been lately (aka “Watch out Wallendas”). He says to me “have you and your Neurologist given any thought lately to DBS?”  For those of you who are not familiar with Parkinson’s lingo, it stands for Deep Brain Stimulation.

Now I have been putting off DBS for as long as possible. I am not really thrilled with the idea of someone drilling holes in my skull and then clamping on a big metal halo thing and screwing it onto my head. If there is any screwing to be done I think it should be with my husband and definitely not require a metal halo and a drill.

But I digress. They thread wires up into your brain and attach them to your globus pallidus. Wait a minute! I am not sure I want someone messing with my globus whatever-idus!
Then they send electric shocks through the wires to make these parts of the brain inactive in order to make the tremors stop. As I’ve stated, I am already electrically unbalanced. So I am a little bit spooked by this idea. They say it does not surgically destroy these parts of the brain. But understandably (since I magnetize stuff), I am a wee bit worried that they will put the wires in, hook me up to the batteries, switch me on, and the wires will become magnetized, getting pulled towards each other and go slicing through my brain, leaving a trail of destruction in my grey matter.

Needless to say, before I make any real decision on this matter, I am going to have to alert my neurologist to my magnetic personality!