The Heart of the Matter

     When we reach our 40’s, body parts start to twitch. We run too far, our legs twitch. We read too late, our eyelids twitch. So, it was with no particular alarm and even some amusement that in the late fall of 1994 I noticed the webbing between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand twitching dramatically, like Sigourney Weaver’s Alien-inhabited torso in the thriller film of the same name.
Over the ensuing months, my hand became increasingly stiff and I became increasingly alarmed. Much of what I was doing for work at the time, which was public relations, required me to use a computer…that is, to type. When I would force my left hand to stretch toward far-flung keys like “A” and “B” and “Z”, I would get woozy and nauseated. The work for which I was trained was literally making me sick. I edged in sideways to a diagnosis.
My first stop, hoping for a comfortable-to-bear explanation, was a naturopath. No answers. I saw a chiropractor, hoping the solution might be the realignment of a few vertebrae. It wasn’t.
Reluctantly, facing up to the possibility that something truly significant was going on, I took the obvious but dreaded next step and saw a neurologist. The doctor took my left hand as if to shake it and, instead, rotated it around the axis of my left wrist. He rotated my entire arm like the drive rods that turn the wheels of a train. The arm jerked like a cogwheel. He had me walk back and forth across his office. Like the Frankenstein monster’s CLUMP/slide, CLUMP/slide, my gait was clumsy. Then he gave me the tentative news: “You have possible early onset of Parkinson’s disease.”
That day, the planet shifted. Nothing in my universe would ever be the same. I learned that slowly yet persistently, my brain was dying.