At the age of 27, I was four decades younger than anyone else in the waiting room of the hospital and I wondered what I was doing there.
I couldn’t help staring at the people there who struggled to make the 25 yard journey to see the Consultant. Some of them were shaking. Some were stiff and rigid, unable to move. And some seemed unable to stop moving and writhed around like injured snakes.
The next 40 minutes became 40 years. Walking out of the consulting room, I looked at the people in the waiting room in a different light. I had just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. I was one of them now.
Up until that point my prospects were good. I had a solid professional job, a good social life and I was sport mad. Suddenly, I was thrust into a world where there was only the grim prospect of being imprisoned within my own body. Parkinson’s is not something you can just sweep under the carpet. There is no known cure. It is a life sentence.
Three years after this diagnosis, I contracted another disorder of the brain – this one is more commonly known as optimism. Of the two, I began to believe that only the latter is incurable and this marked the start of a new life strategy for me. I was aware that I had become a pale reflection of my once cheery self. I was living in a tragedy of a perceived future that might never materialise. To avoid wallowing introspectively, I started to embrace the very thing that was throttling me. I went in search of a cure for Parkinson’s by raising funds and awareness through sponsored walks.
My first walk raised £40,000 walking the length of Britain, from John O’Groats to Lands End and the level of support I received spurred me on to undertake an even more ridiculous challenge. From April 2002 to April 2003, I walked 4,500 miles around the coastline of Britain, raising £350,000.
In 2005, I co-founded The Cure Parkinson’s Trust with three other people with Parkinson’s. The charity has since gone on to raise over £2 million and has been involved in cutting-edge research which we are convinced will make a serious impact on this condition. I am also on the board of the European Parkinson’s Disease Association and represent patient interests in the DeNDRoN Clinical Studies Group and for the World Parkinson’s Congress 2010.
I might not have chosen it, but oddly, once I had accepted that Parkinson’s is part of who I am, I have managed to generate a real sense of fulfillment in my life. I don’t so much hope as believe that there will be a therapy to reverse Parkinson’s in the near future and that one day soon I, and everyone like me, will be able to say, “We used to have Parkinson’s”.
