My friend Dave has been risking his own life saving other people in the water ever since I’ve known him. Before he ever even took formal lifeguard certification classes he saved my 16 year-old bikinied butt by pulling me out of frigid water just as the warm sleepy feeling of hypothermia began to sink in. For 20 years he has worked on the water on bridges, barges and beaches.Dave also surfs and travels whenever and wherever he can.
About six years ago one of his trips led him to Cocles Beach to surf with his friend Marvin. Dave and Marvin spent most of those vacation days rescuing tourists from heavy riptides. Dave loved Costa Rica and says he would’ve continued watching and rescuing and surfing everyday but he had to get off the beach eventually and find work because he wanted to be able to afford to stay in Costa Rica longer.
Some locals though, offered Dave and his friend Marvin payment to stay on the beach and watch for people in trouble in the water. And after a particularly dangerous week the Cocles Lifeguard Program was proposed. Dave was rudely let go within days of the new Cocles Lifeguard Program being set up. The person or people who fired Dave from his paid position had most likely never heard of a genetic disorder called essential tremor because their parting words to Dave suggested his constant trembling was due to drugs or alcoholism and that they could not have someone substance addicted working for them.
Dave insisted he was most certainly neither of these things and that he had always trembled and shook since childhood…but to no avail.
During this time I had lost contact with Dave, but I grew up with him and love him dearly. Just as Dave and others in Puerto Viejo have brought awareness to tourists about the hazards at Cocles Beach; to the Cocles Beach Lifeguard Program and anyone who wishes to read my letter, I write to bring awareness of a genetic anomaly called essential tremor. People with essential tremor have a malfunctioning gene that creates a distortion in the basal ganglia where the internal oscillator resides. This causes varying degrees of shaking with every conscience movement. Eating and drinking without spilling or even chipping one’s teeth becomes difficult. Writing, buttoning up a shirt, shaving and other everyday activities grow more and more challenging.
ET is an inherited condition which can begin as early on as infancy and first presents a series of shuddering or shivering attacks. It affects boys more than girls. By age eight or nine, a person with essential tremor may have a near constant tremble that affects the head, neck, voice and upper limbs. ET sufferers grow accustomed to hearing insulting and sometimes infuriating assumptions when strangers notice their tremor.
Though there are drugs that may treat this condition, the results vary greatly and the medicine is costly. Deep brain stimulation surgery is sometimes recommended, too.
I met Dave when I was 15 and he was 14. That was ’88. We’re older now and Dave lets me shave his beard for him now and help him with his shirt buttons here in San Francisco (where just last month he saved two more people from drowning out at Kelly’s Cove.)
Though he shakes like a leaf, Dave is no nervous wreck, no alcoholic, no drug addict, and never chilly!
He just has benign familial childhood-onset essential tremor.
And he is Aqua Man!