ONE

I’ll Never Forget

November 22, 1963. September 11, 2001. January 6, 2021. You hear a date and you remember the details of that day. I’ll never forget the afternoon of June 2, 2012, the day I met my wife for the first time. She was coming down the escalator in the airport wearing her blue, tie-dye skirt; a black tee; all framed by her favorite denim jacket. I’ll never forget January 9, 2014, either.

I can’t tell you what we were wearing that cold, gray, blustery afternoon. However, the look on her face, and the attempt to say the words she knew should be coming out of her mouth but were stuck, frozen as the snow outside, spoke otherwise.

“You have Parkinson’s paralysis agitens,” the doctor stated. 

As he began to explain, my mind went “finally” while my wife’s demeanor took on a sullen look, just like that afternoon’s sky. Racing through her mind went every Parkinson’s patient she ever had on her hospice caseload, fearing the worst was about to happen to me. 

“Thank you,” I uttered. “Now I have a name to address what has been ailing me these past months.”

“We can get you set up with a neurologist who specializes in Parkinson’s. Before I do that, how are you doing Jean?”

“I didn’t want to say it even though it was on the tip of my tongue. He’s been having trouble walking, shuffling his feet, and we’ve even had to use an electric cart when we’ve been shopping.”

“No. How are you doing?” The doctor's  inquiry was about my wife’s health as she had last seen him thirteen months earlier on a follow-up visit for a mass on her brain. At that appointment, however, he was stunned to see that her most recent MRI showed no sign of the mass. “I can’t explain it. I’d expect small changes, but not this,” was his reaction at the time. 

“I can. A lot of people have been praying for her. God has had a hand in this and He has a reason.” Little did I know that the reason was for him to diagnose me with Parkinson’s just a year later.

Leaving the appointment and driving home, we sat in stunned silence. How are we going to tell people? Do we even tell people? You hear the stories about how people try to avoid telling loved ones and others, thinking that they’re shielding them from pain, hiding them from the hardship that is certain enough to follow, only to realize that in an attempt to hide the disease, loved ones are hurt.

And then I turned toward my wife and said, “I might have Parkinson’s but Parkinson’s doesn’t have me!” She saw it in my eyes. I was scared but determined. 

We made calls to our parents, and Jean fought back the tears as we explained the diagnosis. We were numb, but we were not going to let any fear show. We had to be brave. Besides, we had only been married for seven months. It was too early to think about that ‘till death do us part,’ portion of our vows especially since I promised her fifty years of wedded bliss.

The next day we picked up the script for the first doses of Sinemet, a drug used for the last fifty years in treating Parkinson’s. We thought that this would be all we would need.

This was only the beginning.