ONE IN A MILLION

Parkinson’s disease is complicated, I am talking not the disease itself, I am talking about the emotions that go along with the diagnoses. I can’t speak for everyone, but I was devastated, I had worked my entire adult life to reach the goal of a happy retirement, only to watch it fly right out of the window. I remember sobbing uncontrollably wanting this nightmare to end, and thinking to myself I had nothing more to live for. My son always says the strongest emotion is denial, but for me on that day it was self-pity. I fully understood what my future would look like and I was frightened, but in retrospect I knew nothing about what would lie ahead.

There are two levels of acceptance when dealing with a Parkinson’s diagnoses, the first one is the easy one, you must accept you have the disease. My son is right, denial is a strong emotion, it will drive the sane crazy, all the while wasting valuable time and good health. The effort it takes to ignore facts is significant, yet many people spend years trying to undo the truth. When, if that same effort was spent living an active life, the diagnoses is not quite so devastating. I was lucky, I spent zero seconds in denial, I understood what I was faced with and accepted my fate.

The second level of acceptance is the difficult one, you must accept that there is no cure. I found this reality a tough pill to swallow, I was fully committed to push myself physically in hope of slowing the progression, yet found it tuff to accept I was still losing ground in spite of my efforts. Privately I told myself “I” would be the one who can defeat this disease, but the reality told a different story.  Exercise was the only bullet in my gun and it was a blank, so I thought to myself, what now?

I did the only thing I could do and that was accept my fate. As gloom and doom as that may sound it was in fact liberating, I was no longer keeping track of my decline, my effort is now focused on living. I now accept the struggles and challenges involved in living a full life with Parkinson’s.  My will to live and enjoy my life will provide me with strength necessary to overcome the obstacles that may lie ahead, and for those that are too tuff I will just go around. This disease steals so much from us, our balance, strength, smell, the list goes on and on, but the one thing not on that list is happiness. We choose to either place it on the list or keep it off, the choice is ours.     

by Mark Hitechew