Artwork courtesy Soren Dawson.
Bob Dawson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2004. He lives in rural Quebec, on 75 acres of forest. He and his family sell firewood, and paintings of the trees. This is the family forest.
It’s time the Baby Boomers come out and wreck Old Age like we wrecked the universities, the economy, the financial system, our Volvo’s, and everything else.
Sometimes people with Parkinson’s should be game for a fight. Such as the perfectly normal request that Pharma stop throwing clinical trials into the shredder if the results of the study are not what they had hoped.
Parkies know about hope, and they know about pain, and they know about Waiting for Godot.
But it seems like Parkies talk to each other, but not to anybody else. How can it be that half the studies get thrown off the boat, for 50 years, and nobody said anything? Nobody told us that this was considered to be normal.
We are preaching to the choir inside an echo chamber made with mirrors.
We know what our situation is. But outside, everybody can see our lips moving, but they don’t seem to hear us saying or singing about our strange plight.
Lots of people figure that Parkinson’s is a mild condition. Their hands shake a bit. Big deal. It doesn’t kill them, and it is not painful. They are lucky they still have their good health. Not like Uncle Ned, who has cancer and diabetes and a heart condition and a lot of knife wounds.
See the PwP riding pedal bikes and doing exercise and rowing across the ocean? They are all in great shape, climbing mountains by day and then dancing the night away. Every Parkinson’s organization in the world sends out brochures and newsletters, with a young-looking elderly couple on the cover, basking in the golden light as the sun sets over the water, gazing into the future with a powerful aura of contentment and spiritual fulfillment. Parkinson’s: better than Acapulco.
I think that the major Parkinson organizations should have no difficulty telling the world that hiding and covering up and denying the existence of tens of thousands of medical studies is a very stupid thing to do, and unethical, and it is not going to happen again, because we will shame them into not doing it again. Even if just to support Parkinson’s U.K. and their central position in this political fight. At the same time as British PwP are presenting their case to a select committee of the House of Commons; we are having our Parkinson’s Awareness Month.
Awareness of what?
The whole kit and kiboodle, I would say. The hope and the despair. The glory and the misery. The whole enchilada. The whole nine yards. The Alpha and the Omega. The cat’s pyjamas. The chocolate ice cream on the pizza… no, wait, not that one…