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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
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?'
People with Parkinson's are not some weird people on the edge of human experience.
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.
No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson's. There's no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing.
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.
I discovered that I was part of a Parkinson's community with similar experiences and similar questions that I'd been dealing with alone.
Some genetic variants can be informative about one's risk for Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.
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.