With the touch of a button, Pete Peterson begins to tremble.

His arms move almost rhythmically back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. He can’t control them.

Parkinson’s disease is in control.

But then Peterson’s wife, Susan, touches a different button on a remote control device and, within seconds, the trembling slows. Within minutes, it’s gone.

A deep-brain stimulator has taken over. The stimulator’s electrical impulses haven’t stopped or slowed the disease but they are masking its symptoms.

The stimulator was implanted in Peterson’s brain in 2009.

“Before the surgery, Pete could not get in and out of bed or a chair by himself, and he had trouble rolling over in bed and he was having trouble speaking,” Susan said.

“After the surgery, he could put on his coat, go out the door and go for a walk. It was a second chance.”

Peterson is one of an estimated 500,000 people in the United States who suffer from Parkinson’s disease, according to the National Institutes of Health. About 50,000 new cases are reported annually.

Neurologists at the medical center are now seeing 370 patients, said Wenatchee neurologist Kelly Condefer.

Nationally, officials with the NIH say, figures are expected to increase as the population ages.

Peterson is one of an estimated 90,000 worldwide who have had a deep-brain stimulator implanted to mask symptoms, Condefer said.

Most people are diagnosed with Parkinson’s when they’re in their 60s or older. For Peterson, the diagnosis came in 2002, when he was 47.

The active outdoorsman, who was working as station engineer for KPQ Radio, was taking karate classes, working toward a black belt, when he experienced pain in one arm. Susan said she also noticed that, when Pete walked, his left arm did not swing naturally, “like it was frozen.”

“In a two-week period, he fell off off a snowmobile and he fell off a horse,” Susan said. “It was like, ‘What’s wrong with this picture.’ “

Tests by a Wenatchee neurologist proved what they’d been dreading.

“I didn’t want to have Parkinson’s,” Pete said. “I knew Michael J. Fox and Muhammad Ali have it, and they didn’t like it.”

“My first thought was about him,” Susan said, “then, later, I was thinking, ‘Whoa, this changes our life plans. We had all these plans for retirement, and it was just like walking into a wall.”

Pete worked another 18 months but then quit. He found that climbing on ladders up to radio antennas was not a safe activity for someone with a movement disorder.

Initially, Pete was denied Social Security disability, making Susan, a public information officer with the U.S. Forest Service, the sole wage-earner. That, they said, was hard on Pete.

Medication worked for several years, but the trembling got worse. In 2008, Pete’s doctor suggested he consider the deep-brain stimulator.

“There is only a small window of opportunity for things to work with the surgery, and then the chances of surgery working start to drop,” Pete said.

“He was to the point where tremors had gone from the left arm into the right arm and had begun to exhibit in all four extremities,” Susan said. “His quality of life was starting to really go down hill.”

Next came six months of testing, which included a psychological profile on both of them.

“You enter into this as a partnership,” Susan said. “If the primary caregiver is not strong enough, mentally, to deal with this, then you are not a candidate for the surgery because you’re both going through it.”

Susan said doctors at Virginia Mason Hospital and Medical Center in Seattle told them there was a small chance that the surgery would harm Pete. “He could become a vegetable,” she said. “That’s the reality.”

They decided to proceed, and, to their great relief, the surgery was successful. Before surgery, Pete was in stage three out of five stages of Parkinson’s. “The surgery took him back to 1.5,” Susan said.

“Which is phenomenal,” Pete said.

Today, Pete walks daily with a friend, who also has Parkinson’s, and Pete and Susan try to do as much together as they can. Recently, they visited the Grand Canyon.

“We are trying to live and do our dreams now, as soon as we can,” Susan said. “Our time frame has changed.”

The couple will, however, be doing things with a lot less money than they had before Pete became ill. Their after-insurance costs for his medications run $600 a month, they say, and all the trips to Seattle set them back thousands of dollars. Susan said the surgery costs $130,000 but, with insurance, they were responsible for $10,000.

Some good news came in 2009, when the government approved Social Security disability for Pete.”That gave him an income, and, after the surgery, there was a dramatic cutback in the medications that he uses,” Susan said.

The Petersons, married since 1982, say they don’t know how long the stimulator will continue to mask symptoms, but they are hoping for several more good years.

“We made a conscious decision to support each other,” Susan said. “We try to prepare for the future but we take it in small steps. We don’t play the ‘What if’ game because that could drive you crazy.”

Dee Riggs: 664-7147

deeriggs@wenatcheeworld.com