Parkinson"s Diary, Episode Three: A fall

 On what started to be a very pleasant autumnal walk in the woods, I stumbled, fell onto the ground, and couldn't get up. Couldn't get up at all.

My wife, Nirmala, had suggested taking a walk. We chose to walk in Cylburn  Arboretum, a Baltimore City park fairly close to our house. It is a mini-Longwood gardens, located in North Baltimore, just a few miles away. The park, before it was sold to the city, had been the home of a wealthy capitalist. Sitting in one of the many little gardens of the park, surrounded by statues on pedestals, one can imagine the exclusive and dazzling parties that once occurred there. It is now an arboretum, containing many types of tree and many beautiful flower arrangements that are changed with the seasons. It also contains many wooded trails, a little bit of (mostly) untouched  nature in the center of Baltimore.

One of the trails was the site of my fall. I do have balance and mobility issues due to Parkinson's desease. I had been walking with poor control, trying my best to negotiate the roots and stones on the path. Suddenly I found myself on the ground. I remember falling quite gently--I simply lost my balance and fell down without injury. That was the beginning of my difficulty, however. I could not get to my feet, no matter how hard I tried. Get on you knees, then get up, I told myself; to no avail. Scoot over to a log, sit on it, then get up, I told myself, again to no avail. This went on for about a half hour. 

Finally, a hiker appeared, who, with the help of my wife, managed to get me up.

It was an odd feeling, feeling as able as I had been, yet not to be able to lift myself off the ground. 

I thanked the two hikers, one of whom had helped me, profusely. They left, leaving behind a very strong smell of marijuana. This might have given the hiker a boost of energy, for she weighed a good deal less than I. Thank you, strangers, thank you! Without you, I probably would have struggled to get up a lot longer.

The spirit was willing, but, yes, yes, the flesh had become very weak indeed.

The first serious symptom of the disease was, in my case,  the inability to rise from a chair. I--usually-still am able to rise without assistance, however. But my gait has been poor, increasingly poor, during the past few years. Science tells us that at the time of diagnosis of Parkinson's, the brain of the affected person had  already lost about 60% of the dopamine-producing cells in the brain--resulting in severe and progressive symptoms of neurodegeneration.

I thought I was almost normal when I traveled to Europe a few months ago.  I wasn't--at the airport, officials brought  a wheel chair without my having to ask for one. --Later on that day, at a museum in Amsterdam, a guard supplied me with a walker, also without my having requested one. I obviously had difficulty walking.

It isn't easy being handicapped when you feel almost normal. The handicapped sign for our car, however, has come in handy on several occasions.

Even though depression often accompanies Parkinson's, I do not feel depressed at all. Perhaps a confluence of Lewey bodies in my brain is the reason for my being sanguine, who knows? I do know, however, that despite the facial rigidity characteristic of Parkinson's, I'm still smiling on the inside. Che sara, sara.

Parkinson's Diary, Episode Two: I saw a man upon the stair...

 

A few days ago, my wife was driving us back from the grocery store, when I noticed that we were about to pass an old man—younger than I am, to be sure—who was riding a bicycle. He had on a blue shirt and a white helmet. Since he was ahead of us, I didn’t see his face, nor did I turn around after we had gone on. How did I know he was old? He was moving quite slowly and was hunched over his means of transportation. I couldn’t be sure of his age, but the impression was of a man who bicycled with difficulty. More power to him, I thought. “Why didn’t you slow down as you usually do, and let the old man pass?” I asked. "Passing him at normal speed increases the chance of a serious  accident."

Her reply, which  I will soon divulge, startled me greatly.

That night I was assiduously working at the computer, typing something or other into Microsoft Word. After some time, I noticed from the corner of my eye a mouse, which darted from the living room incredibly fast, then vanished underneath my desk. We had a few mice during spring; this was not anything unusual, except for the speed of the little critter. I resumed work and, when finished, noticed the mouse again, this time darting  from beneath the desk back out into the living room. The mouse must have been doing aerobics for some time, for it, again, was incredibly fast. But something was strange. The mouse headed straight across the living room where I quickly lost sight of it. It didn’t take cover behind the radiator or hide under a bookshelf, as I would have expected. Even stranger, the mouse must have been a student of Zeno. It never managed to outrun itself. I was left with a series of murine images \\darting into the living room, much like stills of a silent film. This was really weird, but I laughed it off. “Perhaps I’m about to be visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past,” I thought, and got up to go to bed. Before I reached the stairs that lead to the bedroom, I saw my beloved cat, Gopi, resting on a couch. His head was lowered slightly; he didn’t look up at me, but I could tell he knew I was there. He had a  sour expression that conveyed, “He’s about to pick me up, and I don’t want to be picked up.” Cats will be cats, I thought, and proceeded up the stairs.

The time has come to answer the question about the man on  the bike. My wife didn’t slow down, because, she told me, there was no man and no bike. “You were seeing things again,’” she said. Similarly, the darting mouse was an illusion as well. And, as I turned off the light, I realized, as I lay in bed,  that Gopi had been dead for several years.

Hallucinations are not at all a rare manifestation of Parkinson’s Disease. Here is what a reliable site has to say about it:

Among people with PD, visual hallucinations are most common, often of people or animals. They tend to be vividly colored and to happen at night. Usually they are not frightening and can become familiar. For example, a person might regularly hallucinate a puppy with a red collar.

That sums up my situation nicely. The old man had on a bright blue shirt; 

the mouse was a vivid dark-brown, and Gopi lay there with black 

and white fur; a loveable cat,  just as he had been in life. I wasn’t 

frightened at all.

I read somewhere that Parkinsonian hallucinations are indicative of a

more serious prognosis. Let’s hope that that had been an illusion as 

well!