July 09, 2004
By Way Of Introduction
I am sitting here at the outset of an online diary and I am wondering how to approach this.
I think what I will do is give you a few basic facts about me, the rest should fall into place as I write more.
I am 43 years old and have been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease.
My diagnosis was given to me almost two years ago.
I take Mirapex for it.
The very first thing I noticed was a slight trembling in my left hand. It was the middle of winter and I put it off as being shivering from the cold, that it was only in one hand did seem odd but my mind did not/could not conceive of it being anything more than just winter shivers.
Well, winter passed but the shaking did not.
I looked up my symptoms online and discovered that the closest thing to what I was experiencing... I learned a new phrase "resting tremor"... were people with Parkinson's Disease.
I dismissed that thought from my mind.
No not me.
Couldn't be.
I was way too young for this to be happening.
So we went to our family doctor and told him what I was experiencing, I purposely avoided using the term Parkinson's because I disdn't want to lead his thinking at all.
He said it though.
I remember it clearly.
"It looks almost Parkinsonian."
He did some wrist movement exercises and it shocked me how stiff my wrist had become. There's a thing they call "cog-wheel rigidity" which means that when the affected side wrist is rotated the person doing the rotating can feel it moving not smoothly at all but with a clicking sensation like, as it is called, a cogwheel.
At this point my wife asks me if I am okay because I apparently went very pale.
Maybe the combination of seeing that my wrist was worse than I even knew, the word "Parkinson's" being mentioned or being told by my wife that I had gone pale... I don't know. But suddenly I felt tears welling up.
The doctor reached for his trusty box of kleenex and tried to be as reassuring as he could be.
He's a good doctor.
Anyway, he is not a neurologist and neurologists are where you go to get deeper into finding out what a problem like this might be.
This is probably enough to read for one entry though.
I'll continue this later on, okay?
Gee, I hope this somehow helps someone out there.
Posted by Lalo on July 9, 2004 07:07 AM