1. The tip of the iceberg
“You’re really slapping that foot tonight.” That astute comment came from my running mate and as usual she was right. For the past year or so I had trouble controlling my left foot when running. Tonight it was worse than usual.
It was a summer evening in 1982 and we were in Friendswood, Texas, a suburb of Houston. We were about halfway through a two mile run. The pattern was the same. My left leg would tire before the right and I would lose a measure of control over the functioning of my left foot. The smooth transition of motion from heel to toe was missing. It had been replaced by an uncontrolled transition where heel contact was followed by the ball of the foot slapping the pavement.
I had been running for about seventeen years. I had run through shin splints, bone bruises and other assorted aches and pains that plague distance runners. They all hurt and they all took time to heal. This problem seemed to be different in that it was not one of the things that a runner could expect to encounter. Also it was not getting any better.
Other problems were starting to emerge. I had been actively involved in weight training since my late teens, a period of some thirty-two years. For about thirty of those years I had been pumping iron without any significant movement of the unsecured plates that I had stacked on each end of the barbell. The exercises that I used to perform smoothly were now being done in a way that caused some of the plates to rattle. I tried reducing the weights but the rattle was still there. I was now in my fiftieth year and I thought it might be due to aging, but as it continued to worsen I began to wonder.
I was also starting to have problems in everyday life. Controlling a bar of soap while taking a shower was becoming difficult. Using a fork and knife when eating required an increased level of concentration. My handwriting, which at best was marginal, now required increased concentration just to make it readable. I was able to rationalize things away for a while but eventually I had to face reality. I had to accept the fact that I had a problem that was getting worse and was not going to go away.
Mohammed Ali was no longer the heavyweight champion but he still claimed to be the greatest. Michael J. Fox had yet to go “Back to the Future.” In fact it would be about two years before he would make that movie. At that time virtually no one, myself included, had ever heard of Parkinson’s disease.
The problems that I was experiencing in the summer of 1982 were merely the tip of the iceberg. Things were going to get a lot worse. I had Parkinson’s disease, but it would be almost five years before I would be diagnosed as having that debilitating disease. In the interim I was to discover that things do not always turn out as expected. The first step in my battle with Parkinson’s began with…
2. The wrong diagnosis.
It was time to accept the fact that my body, or more specifically the muscles of my body, were no longer functioning properly. It was obvious that I was having a problem with my control systems. I further reasoned that because my problem seemed to lie somewhere in my central nervous system I would need the servic