My Personal Experience with Parkinson's
"It won't kill you," the doctor told my Dad.
Just a short note today, I’ll be away from the computer the rest of this week, so the posts will begin again on Wednesday, July 17. Hope you are all enjoying a nice summer. Cheers, Tom
Parkinson’s disease is not the same as dementia; though for some patients dementia may be part of Parkinson’s. It’s a range of deleterious affects on the brain and the body. I’ll try to provide some idea from my personal experience with my Dad, John Foydel.
It starts out rather benignly. Dad told me one night that he had the “mask”. It seemed like a very apt description. The muscles on his face had ceased working. His often expressive face now was a blank. He laughed still, but the muscles around his mouth and eyes failed to register the emotion as they once had. He still had good manual dexterity - he cut my hair the night he told me his diagnosis, as he had for most of my life.
The next steps in the evolution of the disease were mostly hidden from me as his medications helped to prevent any outward signs. But then he entered the hospital with a TIA stroke; a blockage of blood flow in the brain that leads to stroke like symptoms. To help him past this the doctors put him on what we call ‘blood thinners’ or anti-coagulants. But they took him off his Parkinson’s meds. This was the first time I realized that he suffered from hallucinations when not on the meds. His speech came back, but he now saw animals in the room, giants spiders, etc.. It’s still unnerving to remember what it was like to sit with him at the hospital while he hallucinated.
The disease was changing now, accelerating if you will. Soon he was unable to shave anymore, and his sleep went from 10 hours a day to 12, then to 16 and then to 20. Mom complained that she couldn’t wake him up in the morning. He would finally manage to get up, wash and comb for breakfast, then soon after he was back to sleep. During this period his stiffened body became more difficult to manage and he started to use a walker for balance. After a while they started to take their meals in their apartment. He was almost completely sedentary.
Parkinson’s didn’t kill my Dad, the Doctor was right about that. But it did make his life much less than what it could have been. It’s also not a simple disease. It changes over time; eventually fewer and fewer muscle groups are working together. I would even say that it accelerates over time. The last 6 months were painful to watch. Dad lost his energy, lost his focus. When he was up for an hour or so he was fine. We could talk, though as soon as he got tired again, he’d start a story only to have the thought vanish, leaving him perplexed. Then he’d go lay down and the light went out. The medications help to reduce the worst of the symptoms but they don’t halt the disease’s march, nor its quickening pace. There is no cure.
That’s Parkinson’s disease.
