Parkinson’s Disease
Parkinson’s Disease is a silent robber. It can sneak up and rob a sufferer of their normal every day life. Luckily, medical advances today mean that this disease can be controlled – unfortunately, it hasn’t always been this way. Sadly, I never knew my own grandmother properly because she suffered from Parkinson’s Disease.
I can’t recall exactly when the symptoms of my grandmother’s disease began to manifest, although it was clearly long before I was personally aware. I was kept blissfully ignorant of events but for all my twelve short years whilst she was alive, there was never a time when she was the kind of grandmother that other children had. There were no day trips or shopping trips, no sleep-overs or outings that my own children have enjoyed over the years with my parents. Visits to see my grandmother were hard and I had to be gently cajoled into going on more than one occasion and once there, I spent most of my time in her garden if it were fine or on my own reading. Interaction with my grandmother was all but impossible.
As with many Parkinson’s sufferers, her mind wandered more and more and she lived in her own closed in world which no-one could penetrate. Mostly, she would sit in her chair, shaking with the dreadful tremors which accompany this disease. When she could be persuaded to get up, she would shuffle reluctantly around the room with some help and allow herself to be accompanied to the bathroom but would always beg pitifully to be allowed to return to the safety of her chair. Her whole life revolved around that chair.
For my grandmother, simple household objects took on startling personas to her – she would shout and shake her fist at a particular lamp stand which stood in the front room, believing it to be some strange man who’d broken into her home. Even removing the lamp had no effect as she still “saw” it. Of course, as a child, I could only see the humorous side of this, not realising that the illness was taking a deep grip on her slowly but surely. It must have been heart-breaking for my mother and her sisters to watch this decline and be unable to help.
The tremors increased in both frequency and strength until my grandmother was unable to even hold a cup and saucer. In my childish ignorance, I always found it amusing to watch as the tea spilt out of the rattling cup into the saucer and then to the floor. For my mother, the constant clearing up must have been wearing, especially as my grandmother had also become incontinent at times, adding to the stress and indignity of her illness.
My grandmother continued to “see” the lamp stand man and always insisted that he was in the house. My cousin, an expert seamstress, had made her wedding dress and had placed the almost completed created on a dressmaker’s mannequin in my aunt’s front room. My grandmother had spent the day there but on being left alone briefly, took that time to wander into the front room and attack the mannequin, thinking it was the “lamp stand” intruder. The damage she caused to the dress took a week or so to repair; my cousin’s equilibrium took a little longer.
My grandmother’s death at the early age of 72 was a blessing in disguise. By the time she passed, her quality of life had deteriorated considerably; she didn’t recognise any of her family and she had no recollection of what was happening around her from one moment to the next. There was no medication to control the disease like there is today and she, along with many others at that time, suffered considerably.
Had I been older during those years, I would have been able to understand so much more, rather than being frightened of the frequent outbursts and strange behaviour. Thankfully today, medical intervention allows sufferers to lead productive lives with minimal symptoms in most cases.
Parkinson’s is caused by the loss of brain cells that produce a chemical called dopamine, which results in low levels of the chemical in your brain. Dopamine is a chemical messenger or neurotransmitter, which makes other parts of your brain that co-ordinate movement work properly.
Parkinson’s affects around one to two out of 100 people over 65 and it’s slightly more common in men than in women. Most people develop the condition at around the age of 65 but around one in 12 people with Parkinson’s start having symptoms before the age of 40 (known as “early-onset of Parkinson’s Disease”)
Symptoms of Parkinson’s
As different muscles become affected, the sufferer may also develop:
