What is Parkinson's Disease?

If you read the medical definition of Parkinson's disease, it sounds like a drawn out oxymoron:  "Parkinson's disease is a degenerative neurological disease characterized by involuntary movements and lack of movement." What?

I like to think of Parkinson's disease as a communications problem. My brain is saying one thing and my body is doing something else.

  

Parkinson's reminds me of a boy I knew in high school. He had an older car, a fixer upper. This car seemed to be possessed. One day, you would turn on the radio and the headlights would come on. The next day, you would turn on the wipers and the horn would blow or the turn signals would come on. It seemed like gremlins were re-wiring the car while he slept. It drove him crazy. He never knew what was going to happen when he got in the car to drive to school in the morning. Every weekend, he would search under the hood for the problem and find nothing. No blown fuses, no burned wires, everything looked kosher.  

YumaBev's squirrel

Then one day he saw some seeds on the floorboard. That's strange, he thought.  The car was closed up tight and locked. The next day he found more seeds. He did some digging and found that a squirrel had been nesting inside his dash. It was scrambling around all night and sneaking out in the morning. This was the cause of his electrical problems; seeds, twigs, pieces of trash all hidden behind the dash.

Parkinson's is a lot like that squirrel in the dash, messing around, so you don't know what will happen when you try to blow your horn.

Thank you for reading this story, I hope you enjoyed it. This is just one of a hundred stories in my book, Parkinson's Humor - Funny Stories about My Life with Parkinson's Disease. Please consider purchasing a copy from Amazon.com or your favorite online book seller. Thank you and have a Happy Parky Day!