As a practicing neurologist, I can tell you first hand that working with Parkinson's patients offers clinical challenges. But from an emotional perspective, this disease can border on overwhelming.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Parkinson's is a slow but inevitable process. It's hard living with it on a daily basis. The difficulty facing people with it is that they never quite know 'Can I or can't I do this today?'
Parkinson's is very hard to diagnose. So when I finally went to a neurologist, and he said, 'Oh, you have Parkinson's disease,' I was completely shocked.
Parkinson's is described as a progressive idiopathic neurodegenerative disorder, a brain disease that will worsen with time for which no cause has as yet been identified.
I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson's. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there's freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn't have otherwise found myself in.
In fact, Parkinson's has made me a better person. A better husband, father and overall human being.
As much as Parkinson's is about movement, the end stage is being frozen. So the more I let that happen, the more I'm gonna be stuck within that and unable to reverse it.
I discovered that I was part of a Parkinson's community with similar experiences and similar questions that I'd been dealing with alone.
The most important thing is to bring people with Parkinson's into our world and for the public to have a real understanding of it, as they're beginning to have with autism.
You can have a very bad end with Parkinson's, but on the other hand, you can be like me, because I'm lucky. I'm not having a bad end.
People with Parkinson's are not some weird people on the edge of human experience.