It Must Be Someone Else

I have not told many people this and since I don't think anyone that knows me reads this blog so I will go ahead and say that I have been diagnosed with what they call early onset Parkinson's Disease. I am about to turn 48 years old and those words were a little tough to hear, but I did not feel any different at the time. Now I have started noticing differences. It is a slowly progressive (although some cases progress much faster than others) neurological condition that is ultimately fatal. We are talking ten or twenty years and maybe more down the road. I was told about this condition about a year ago and I had only begun to notice symptoms then. The symptoms have occurred much more frequently over the past couple of months but I have been able to keep a lid on it and no one has really noticed. There was once incident when I was trying to eat a small bag of M & M's out of the snack food machine at work and I had a bad spasm and I threw my M & M's all over the floor. Everyone that was present laughed, I was a little embarrassed but I laughed it off, no one got hurt by the flying M & M's, and no one knows the real reason the candy went flying. I have done a lot of research on the subject and the Michael J. Fox Foundation has really pushed the condition to the forefront and campaigned for public awareness on the subject. A lot of people have described the condition as "a blessing" and I am working hard to look at it that way as well. A blessing can only be a positive thing and life is what you make of it. I need this to be a positive.