Dear Gin and Pete,
 
I'm so pleased that you've joined this group.  I've been wanting to tell
people about us:  How we had been neighbors for eight years on Slab
Creek Road.  How you stayed in that most beautiful corner of the Oregon
Coast's rainforest when my family pulled me away to Los Angeles 13 years
ago.  How you gracefully wove the news of Ginny's PD into a Christmas
letter.  I was devastated and avoided writing back, afraid that I'd say
the wrong thing.  I didn't really know what PD was.  A few years later
I was weaving the same news into my own Christmas cards.
 
After the two of us "got" PD, the neighbors up and down Slab Creek Road
were of course wondering who would be NEXT.  Had the logging companies'
herbicide campaign drifted that terribly into our neighborhood?  Had
there been something toxic in our drinking water, even though we drew ours
from different sources?  Both your Oregon neurologist and my California
neurologist belittled the idea that there was a common cause, and shrugged
it off as a coincidence.
 
Gin, the number of coincidences in our two lives has been very funny.
Many of them relate to various theories about the cause of PD.  Toting
up the statistically insignificant, completely anecdotal evidence:
 
We lived in rural areas (yours in Oregon? and mine in Pennsylvania) when
we were young children.  There is a five year difference in our ages.  Still
it was in general an era when DDT was routinely sprayed everywhere including
on screen doors within reach of small hands and faces.  I think I can
remember the taste.
 
We lost our fathers early and traumatically.  We were both eight years old.
 
We grew up as the "afterthought child", alone with our widowed, strong,
stiff-upper-lip mothers.  The older three children had grown and gone.
Was a "Parkinson's personality" developed by that kind of childhood?
 
As high school seniors, we applied but were both rejected by Stanford! --
probably more of a blessing than a trauma, since we went on to other
schools and spent part of our college years studying in Europe.
 
We married men who had both been reporters for the Portland Oregonian.
(It would be a real stretch to correlate that with PD!)  They were also
active in building our houses at the Coast when we became neighbors.
We may have had some exposure to toxins in solvents and wood
preservatives then, even in that "back to the land" period.  And there
were herbicides sprayed in nearby forests.
 
We both experienced mild syptoms of PD for a long time.  It was only
after our mothers died that the symptoms became so strong that we had
to seek help.  That happened dramatically, within a few months of
their deaths.
 
Of course there were many differences in our lives.  These odd touchpoints
probably have no significance.  Our "weird" coincidences only help me
to appreciate how complex the search for the cause must be.
 
I suspect that the cure or at least better treatment will appear almost
as if by chance.  So many breakthroughs could never have been predicted --
such as MPTP leading to better animal modeling.  Wasn't L-dopa itself
developed as a flu medication that "accidentally" helped someone with
Parkinson's?
 
I don't mean to downplay systematic research.  It's heartening to see the
many different angles being taken.  The surveys being done such as the
one from the Parkinson's Institute in Sunnyvale give me hope.  They're
asking questions about us as whole people, not just as collections of
of symptoms.
 
It's a pleasure to be your "neighbor" again via internet.  It can't
substitute for the Christmas gift you once gave me -- a hike to your
favorite high hill in the rainforest, with a 360 degree view, and a
detour by a waterfall on the way down.  Still it's comforting to
have you "near".
 
Mary Yost
47, diagnosed 1990, 2x25/100 sinemet, 2x5mg eldepryl, 75mg pamelor, Tai Chi,
singing, daily bellylaugh & dram of sherry, quasi-vegetarian, Belgian-American