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Monday, July 18, 2011

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!

12 comments:

  1. so squirrels are the source of our problem. How do we get rid of 'em? Nut traps?

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  2. my squirrel is drinking RED BULL today!!!

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  3. my squirrel ate all her nuts today!!!!

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  4. Good analogy. Stephen

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  5. Squirrels and nuts. Pretty good explanation!
    Theresa

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  6. Thanks YumaBev your blog is just brilliant keep it up!

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  7. I have a whole heard of squirrels behind my dashboard.

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  8. So on point! You've perfectly described how I feel.

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  9. Great . Enjoyed the humour , lucid language, felicity of expression . It shows sombre Medical diagnoses can be explained in a very simple way , in a few words.
    Well , now I know P.D happens when brain goes messy - the wild brain , crazy brain says one thing , the body does the other. The body goes haywire hearing the wrong signals from the brain . Am I right ?

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  10. I like your definition that PD is a communication problem - the brain saying one thing and the body doing something else. I’ve invented a new word to describe this ..... Dysconnambulation ! Ken

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  11. Yup, that's it. I still look at my hands when they start shaking while I'm doing something like trying to play the guitar, and say, "C'mon guys, really, right now?", almost like they can actually hear me. Scott

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