Author: Michelle Terrill Heath

One of the amazing aspects I’ve experienced as a caregiver choosing honesty over being nice, is that honesty with a purpose leads us back to being nice. In a life without a chronic disease challenge and in relationships that don’t require a caregiver role, I […]

 When one is a caregiver ‘making it right’ is different from actually changing the situation that is unfair into one that is fair. I wondered, “How does one deal with the anger that can happen in a patient/caregiver relationship when feeling like life isn’t fair?” […]

Our garden has always been our work in progress and so it is with my own healing. I’m getting there. I have to do a bit every day and only pay attention to my own timing. When I hurt myself in a pretty awful skiing […]

All lives go through times of discouragement and hard news and it is then that we can turn to the very small things that bring us joy and allow them to lift us up. Parkinson’s is such a long disease…once it begins it goes on […]

Nobody wants to live without companionship and connection. These are basic human needs we all have. As a wife and mother and daughter, sister, aunt, cousin and now mother in law I relate to how relationships flow and shift, when they are healthy. Nobody has […]

Those of us who have pets can usually know if our dog, cat or horse is out of sorts or happy. It is this same reading of energy we naturally do with them, that I am learning to do with Andy. One of the strangest […]

I say, “With Parkinson’s old things become new things.” In my 30 years of life with Andy, before Parkinson’s- from age 17-47 for me- he is the one in our partnership who planned for our mutual goals. I was a willing and creative partner and […]

I like to and am able to move to many types of music and I also love to be in synchrony with Andy. He doesn’t have the ability to adjust to the variety of music life presents and so it is up to me to […]

Incurable disease is a life sentence.Let’s reemphasize that.Incurable disease is a life sentence not a death sentence. I thought that Parkinson’s disease hijacking Andy’s voice and rendering him a forever whisperer was as bad as that could get, until we were in speech therapy for […]