Author: Michelle Terrill Heath

Changing plans has to become ones second nature in order to camp successfully with Parkinson’s. I recognize that camping isn’t for everybody, but we love it and have found camping with Parkinson’s to be an extraordinarily wonderful experience. We started our tent camping adventures after […]

We drive all over our country to camp and explore new places and to visit family and friends. We’ve found traveling by car to be a luxurious way to go. We purposely bought a car that provides us with comfortably engineered seats with plenty of […]

 There are some tricks to making our travels by airplane work for us and the first thing to know is that traveling with someone with Parkinson’s is not the same as traveling with the healthy general public. Flying used to be fun and what I […]

Making the effort to travel is one way we’ve chosen to mitigate the effect of our losses and to create new possibility. I have found that traveling with my husband, who has lived with Parkinson’s disease for 18 years, is important to us. When planning […]

We are no longer anonymous when we travel together- we have become ambassadors representing every person who lives with an illness that can cause awkward moments. What is an awkward moment? As I think about my own awkward times, they usually occur because I have […]

When we traveled to India, we had a very different experience when we were out in public  and that gave Andy the courage to embrace for himself that he could be a teacher, instead of a spectacle. When we arrived at the orphanage, we were […]

We rarely saw other people who were dealing with an illness or a condition that was visible. Andy was often the only person in the hardware store or the grocery line who was shaking. What gets lost in the soul of a person who lives […]

So, why travel when the patient has to deal with all these obstacles? On the surface, “traveling with Parkinson’s” sounds like a story about the Parkinsons family- but Parkinson’s is also an incurable disease that wreaks havoc on any family who has a loved one […]

People living with chronic and often incurable disease cannot will their condition away. It’s up to those without those challenges to notice, step up, offer, be willing, engage and support those brave enough to come out of isolation and grace our world with their presence. […]

Andy has loved weight lifting for most of his life and Parkinson’s stopped that activity for years, because it was too dangerous. Nowadays, I drive Andy to the gym and he works with a gifted personal trainer who has a deep understanding of Parkinson’s challenges. […]