Connie Carpenter-Phinney could tell the difference the minute she saw her husband, Davis Phinney. She immediately saw the man she married in 1983, not the man who was diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson’s disease eight years ago.
On April 25, after neurosurgeons in Palo Alto, Calif., dialed up the settings for a device they had surgically implanted in his brainstem three weeks earlier, Carpenter-Phinney saw her husband’s maddening tremors stop.
“This mask you had for a number of years,” she told him, “just lifted.”
Phinney, 48, hasn’t received a completely clean bill of health. He’s not biking up any Category 1 peaks in the Pyrenees anytime soon. But the Boulder High grad who won a U.S.-record 328 bike races and an Olympic bronze medal has won a major battle over a crippling disease.
When he returned home to Boulder on April 28, he wasn’t seeing many visitors to cushion the return. But in a phone interview, Davis’ voice didn’t have a single stutter, stammer or pause, unlike before.
“It’s not quite as dramatic as someone coming back to life,” he said. “I wasn’t dying. But in essence, I did have that feeling: My God, I’ve been given a gift I never could’ve imagined.”
While stem-cell research is still years away from becoming a tool in battling Parkinson’s, the deep-brain stimulation performed on Phinney can be as close to a cure as they come. In the 4 1/2-hour procedure, neurosurgeon Jaimie Henderson inserted a tiny electrode into an area of the brain called the subthalamic nucleus.
The electrode carries impulses that essentially block the tremors and minimize other symptoms.
“I would absolutely say this is like a new lease on life,” Phinney said.
To understand his progress, you must understand his regress. At a time his 17-year-old son, Taylor, has emerged as an Olympic cycling hope on the track, Davis often didn’t go out in public because of embarrassing tremors. They sometimes prevented him from sleeping more than two hours a night, making last month’s travels to Manchester, England, to watch his son make the Olympic team exhausting. When Davis went off his medication for 20 hours before his operation, he couldn’t touch his thumb and forefinger together.
“I was tremoring like crazy,” Davis said. “I was so miserable. I was so frigid and tight.”
He said he’s weaning himself off medication. He plans on traveling to Beijing to watch his son ride in August and some day, hopefully, to France to watch him ride in the Tour de France. Right now, Davis has other tasks at hand.
“I immediately dropped into my 600-mph life,” he said, “and am showing off my new mind.”
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
