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Ivan’s joy at coming home after 5 weeks respite was marred when he discovered his bed had been brought downstairs to the living room. “I feel as if I have been written off!” I explained that, on the contrary, every effort had been made to enable him to continue living independently. Fortunately, he realises that the new arrangement has made his life much simpler, given his slowness and stiffness. Using the stair lift had become dangerously awkward.
Three years ago, in late March, I was in Paris with six members of my Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients forum for three days of sightseeing, PD support and friendship (I should confess that I was the token male and the other six were all females). All bar one of us had met before and most of us have met on more than one occasion since.
Music has always been important to me and I started recorder lessons at the age of eight with mother Mary Magdalene, a nun at my convent school. I then moved on to the violin and scraped my way through several exams and made it to the back row of the second fiddles in the local youth orchestra. However, my real passion was always singing. I enjoyed singing in the school choir, but the lack of boys was a distinct disadvantage and at the age of 15 I had to suffer the indignity of being the leading boy in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury.
When I started my degree course at college last September I originally wanted to study just History as a single subject. However, my nearest local college only offered combination degrees so I chose History and Sociology. The nearest college offering just History was about 35 miles away from where we live which is unfortunately more than my Parkinson’s disease (PD) allows me to drive.
My sister recently stumbled across a website that detailed the family tree on our mother’s side of the family, going back to the 16th century. Our mother was born in 1931 in an area in the east of England known as the Fens, where her family have been traced back on this website to 1572.
People say that a week is a long time in politics. It seems it can also be a long time in Parkinson’s disease. So much can change in just a few days.
Last week was the eighth anniversary of my Parkinson’s disease (PD) diagnosis. Not a happy anniversary to remember but equally one that is very hard to forget. Eight years ago I walked into the neurologists consulting room at my local hospital with a limp that I assumed was caused by a trapped nerve and walked out no more than 15 minutes later with a diagnosis of PD. A PD diagnosis is never definitive, as there are no tests to absolutely confirm it, but my neurologist was sure enough that he decided not to try and eliminate other possibilities via further tests like brain scans.
It was a shock being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD) at the young age of 47. In those early days, I was anxious to know what to expect and I spent hours scouring the Internet for symptoms and treatments. It was full of bewildering terms I did not understand like dyskinesia and others I dreaded like dribbling. Nowhere did the websites tell me that it was going to be easy. There were many uncertainties: how would PD progress?; what it was like living with PD?; and how long would I be able to work? I wrongly assumed that the medical profession would be able to give me answers to these questions, but later discovered that Parkinson's symptoms vary in their sequence and intensity between individuals and there was no way of clearly predicting what lay ahead.
Until last week we had enjoyed one of the mildest winters on record where we live in the eastern part of the UK. However, around 10 days ago that all changed with the arrival of snow and below freezing air temperatures. We only had about 4 inches of snow but with the temperature rarely getting above freezing and at times as low as -8°C, the ice and snow have not yet gone away.
The other day a mysterious large brown envelope arrived in the post for him, addressed in vaguely familiar handwriting. It felt as if it contained a card. I left him to open it and went off to make lunch. Later I asked what it had contained. “Nothing” he replied innocently. I guessed it might have contained a Valentine card for me and forgot all about it.
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