GOOGLE – CONFUSION – REALITY

 19 DAYS TO DBS

So that’s it then I have officially got Parkinson’s so I join the other 120,000 unfortunate people in the UK with this F****N horrible disease.

So after the bombshell of being told you have a condition you don’t know anything about, what do you do?

Well in this modern age you do what everybody does YOU HIT GOOGLE for all the answers!!

You read everything you can and after you’ve exhausted every medical web site, every Parkinson’s page and every other web site you can find, at last your educated, happy and fully understand your new condition……………..Don’t you?

NO! YOU’RE MORE CONFUSED THAN WHEN YOU’RE STARTED, I BET YOU’VE ALL DONE IT

It took a couple of weeks to decipher all the information and get the answers and basic understanding of the condition that had chosen to invade my body.

I hope you don’t mind but I feel it’s important to list the very basics

Parkinson’s is a progressive degenerative neurological condition – It continues to get worse, caused by a deficiency of a chemical in the brain called Dopamine.

Medication is the main treatment, drugs restore the dopamine levels lost in the brain and basically mimics its actions. A relevant note to make at this point is that Parkinson’s medication is only effective for a period ( I was told between 10 – 15 years )

Without dopamine your body and its movements slow down and it takes longer to do things. This can make everyday activities, such as eating, getting dressed, using a phone or turning a key sometimes impossible!

The 3 main symptoms of Parkinson’s are tremor, muscle stiffness and slowness of movements. But not everyone will experience all of these.

Tremor is the most obvious to people. When I say tremor this can be anything from fingers twitching to arms and body shakes about uncontrollably.

My symptoms (other than at the start with my twitchy thumb) have always been the muscle stiffness and slowness of movements and I will talk more about this later.