Key Points
- Tom Ryder is a retired corporate executive who underwent focused ultrasound for his essential tremor in 2021.
- After a successful treatment, he became a Foundation donor and joined the Board of Directors.
Thomas O. Ryder is an investor, entrepreneur, and retired corporate executive who underwent focused ultrasound for his essential tremor in 2021. After a successful treatment, he became involved with the Focused Ultrasound Foundation as a donor and joined the Board of Directors in March 2022. He shared his story, transcribed below, at a recent event.
I first noticed my tremors when I was 40, and I was giving a speech at a podium. When I went to take a sip of water, my hand was shaking. I noticed it, and so did the audience. But I had given thousands of speeches, and I never got nervous. I couldn’t make sense of that.
Around the same time, I also noticed it in my golf game. I developed a case of incurable chip yips. I went to countless golf pros to try to fix the issue, and I even learned to chip and putt backhanded. But while those two things were going on, I didn’t connect the dots.
My doctor wasn’t sure what was going on, but it was getting worse. It wasn’t until my wife Darlene and I were flying to Seattle, and the in-flight magazine had an advertisement that showed two concentric circles. One was perfect, and the one below it was all over the place. And it said, “If your circle is like the one at the bottom, you may have benign essential tremor.” Darlene immediately knew that was what I had, and she was right.
So, I set out on a path to find out how to treat it. First, I tried homeopathic treatments. I altered my diet, drank decaf coffee, and avoided alcohol. Unfortunately, alcohol was one of the only things that helped settle the tremor temporarily. But soon, the disease progressed to the point that it was debilitating. It began to affect my speech a little bit, but my dominant hand was completely lost. I could no longer write, and working on the computer was a challenge. I became very good at hiding it in public. I would always have my right hand in my pocket, and people didn’t notice. I am right-handed, but I had to learn to eat with my left hand. When I finally sloshed tomato soup on a dinner guest of mine, I decided I had better do something.
One day I was working out in the gym with Nick Hopkins, MD, who is a major talent in the neurosurgery world. The standard treatment for essential tremor at the time was deep brain stimulation, where electrodes are inserted into the brain and wired to a pacemaker. That procedure was covered by Medicare, but it was not something I was willing to do. Nick and the rest of my team of doctors then put me in touch with Neal Kassell, who told me about focused ultrasound. And the more I studied, the more I concluded that it was a no-brainer decision – with one exception. To undergo focused ultrasound, the patient’s head has to be shaved, and I truly did not want to have my head shaved. I know it sounds crazy, but that can be a large deterrent for patients, especially women.
So, I waited another year or so in the hopes that they would develop a process where I didn’t have to shave my head, but no luck. I finally scheduled the treatment at the University of Virginia. The morning of treatment, I was calm and curious. I had been very well briefed, and in the end, there were no surprises. The procedure took 30 minutes, and I was awake the whole time. Before you begin the treatment, they have you draw those concentric circles and straight lines as a baseline. I could barely hold the pen. Then, during the treatment, they periodically pull you out of the MRI machine to have you try to draw again. After 15 minutes, I was holding the pen and making circles and straight lines. After 30 minutes, it was almost perfect. That was three years ago.
That night, Darlene and I went out to dinner in Charlottesville. We sent a picture to my children of me drinking coffee out of a china cup. My children immediately understood the significance because for 40 years, I’d been drinking coffee out of a sippy cup. I can still use the china cups today with no tremor at all.