Andy’s whispered words carry weight. After Andy gently told some musician friends to “Keep practicing!” Another friend observed, “Andy says in a two word whisper more than most people say in an hour of talking.” As I age and have plenty of years under my […]
Many Parkinson’s patients experience a symptom called Bradykinesia- or slowness of movement. The cause of this symptom is a lack of dopamine but the effect I’ve seen in Andy is frustration and a lack of tolerance both in himself and in people interacting with him- […]
We know a spell of negative thoughts can occur in any person’s life, but a tendency towards negative thinking is actually part of the symptom menu that gets triggered with Parkinson’s disease. Looking back, I can identify negative thought patterns in Andy that presented a […]
Andy loved being part of the team. His life was productive and had purpose as long as we found ways to work around his Parkinson’s limitations. We did this by paying close attention and using timing and the tools we had, correctly. Andy’s experience with […]
For most people, swallowing seems like one of those automatic parts of life, like your heart beating or breathing. Parkinson’s compromises the automatic part. A patient can have a hard time controlling their saliva in the ways healthy people are able to and instead, a […]
The cognitive danger Andy lives with is not an inability to participate but rather an inability to keep up. In life, we all have our pace of moving, thinking and doing. To get along in the world we match ourselves to other’s paces and rhythms. […]
Living this way, with a husband who used to express himself fully, wholeheartedly and clearly, is sometimes painful for me. There are days I wish I handled it all better, and one of these recently happened. Some people with Parkinson’s have physical symptoms of numbness […]
This is one of the symptoms that most patients do experience at some point in the course of living with Parkinson’s. It is strange to witness and even stranger to live with. Andy would be standing at our kitchen counter, perhaps taking some medicine, and […]
Tremors make living hard. For Andy, it began innocuously in only one finger and seemed like an annoyance. After a year, it grew into the life altering condition people with Parkinson’s live with and that makes friends wonder how they can live that way. Tremors […]
What I see as the cruelest aspect of this disease is when a patient accepts and allows that their symptoms isolate them from life and therefore live in “otherness” leaving so called healthy people to carry on without them. For Andy and me, Parkinson’s has […]
