Ken Anderson

"I wanted so badly just to write my name."

Ken Anderson has a good, firm handshake, full of confidence and determination. But his hands haven't always been so steady.

When Ken was barely 2 years old, his mother noticed that unlike other children, Ken couldn't keep peas on his fork. His hands shook. And as he grew older, the problem grew worse.

Concerned, Ken's parents took him to their family doctor. "Don't worry. He'll grow out of it," they were told.

But Ken never grew out of it. The mysterious trembling worsened through the years, causing illegible penmanship that made education difficult and holding a job even harder.

An engineer, Ken found himself out of work almost seasonally. "If they got me into a meeting and said, 'Write what you mean on the board,' that was a big problem. ... Whenever I got laid off, I wondered if it was because work was slow or my hand shook."

Through the years, the Andersons had continually sought medical help. But almost 70 years after the shaking started, Ken's condition was finally diagnosed at Mayo Clinic in Arizona.

Ken has a good, firm handshake but his hands haven't always been so steady.

Unstoppable Tremor?

Ken suffers from essential tremor — a shaking disorder that usually involves the hands, arms and chin, although other body parts can be affected. Jerky, up-and-down movements make it nearly impossible to perform basic actions such as holding a cup of coffee, writing or using a knife and fork. Motions such as touching someone else's fingertips are difficult. And trying to stop the tremor only makes it worse.

The tremor affects Ken's right hand more than it does his left, although both hands shake. The symptoms became more severe with age.

"He got so that he couldn't eat, he didn't want to go out," Ken's wife, Nancy, remembers. "I'd say, 'We're going to someone's house.' But no, he didn't want to go, because it would embarrass him because he couldn't eat properly."

"She would have to cut the meat or potato, because the smaller pieces would just go flying," Ken says with a grimace. "And forget about eating a meatball sandwich or handling a plate at the church banquet."

There is no single treatment for essential tremor, and its exact cause remains unknown. Doctors sometimes recommend drugs including beta-blockers (drugs that affect the involuntary nervous system), antiseizure medication and tranquilizers — but in some patients, the side effects can be severe.

"The medicines," Ken remembers from years of medical guesswork at symptom management. "I never got a medicine that didn't have some kind of side effect that would really throw me," he says. "The side effect was worse than the help."

But Mayo Clinic had a radical new procedure to offer: deep brain stimulation.

Brain Surgery — Awake!

Deep brain stimulation works by placing electrodes in the patient's brain. The electrodes deliver mild electrical stimulation to block the brain signals that cause uncontrollable shaking. The generator for the electrodes is implanted near the collarbone and can be turned on and off with a special remote control.

The procedure had been performed several times at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. Ken was to be the first to undergo deep brain stimulation at Mayo Clinic in Arizona.

"Well, that scared me. Deep brain. Number one," he says.

Not only would Ken have a revolutionary new brain surgery, he would remain awake throughout the operation, so that the neurosurgeon and neurologist could test the stimulation and place the electrodes where they would be most effective. Ken's job was to report any side effects and by holding a cup or moving an arm, show how well the tremor was being suppressed.

Ken had been going to doctors for years, but with so much attention focused on his hands, no one had ever noticed what was going on with his heart. During Mayo Clinic's evaluation, doctors discovered that Ken needed two bypasses and an aortic valve replacement — without them, he may have lived only eight months longer.

A Whole New World

Ken's heart surgery was a success, and the deep brain surgery was performed in two parts — on the brain's left side for the tremor in Ken's right hand in April 2002, and the procedure for his left hand in November 2002.

"Once that generator was in, you could hardly believe that I'd had essential tremor," he says

"(Before the procedure) when we went to lunches and dinners at church and you have to get in line and get a plate, [Nancy] had to get two plates. I couldn't do anything. ... But after, I can hold the plate, load the plate myself, just like the rest of you people, pour a cup of hot coffee and carry it eight, nine, 10 times the length of this room and put it down on the table."

To prove his point, Ken turns his generators off, goes to the sink, and takes a paper cup from the stack on the counter. The stack falls to the floor and comes undone. Cups roll everywhere, under the sink and around our feet. Ken grips one of them, determined, and turns on the tap.

His right hand shakes violently, and it's a miracle he can even get water in the cup. It doesn't stay there for long, splashing all over the mirror and sink and wetting Ken's shirt as he attempts to drink.

But Ken motions that no one should mop up the spilled water. "I'll clean it up. I'm used to it," he says. With a devilish sparkle in his eye, he presses the remote control to his chest.

"I feel like the luckiest guy in the world."

Suddenly Ken's arms are still. He calmly refills the cup and drinks the water without spilling a drop, then takes some paper towels and wipes the counter clean.

Nancy sits nearby, beaming. "My life has changed," she says. "It isn't as tense, it's not as stressful. He'll say, 'Let's go somewhere.' Okay, we'll go. It's like a whole new world."

Essential tremor sometimes runs in families. Recently, Ken and Nancy have noticed its all-too-familiar characteristics in a young granddaughter. But they take heart, knowing that Ken pioneered a treatment at Mayo Clinic Arizona that can help future essential tremor victims live normally.

Says Ken, "For the first 70 years of my life, I couldn't write my name as I do now. I feel like the luckiest guy in the world."