Ah,Dennis,  Just the fact that you can enjoy a new day on your patio sitting
on a chair damp with dew,  what  a beautiful thought that has to be to so
many, many people!!  You are blest.

May the new year grant you peace.
Elizabeth
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-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis Greene <[log in to unmask]>
To: Multiple recipients of list PARKINSN <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 25. prosince 1997 13:01
Subject: And so this is Christmas


>I woke early this Christmas morning - earlier than I wanted to and
>much earlier than I had intended.  PD does that to PWP; I'm used to
>it, but I don't like it.  I moved through the cool darkness of the
>house, enjoying the break from the relentless daylight heat of this
>unusually hot start to a Western Australian summer. The only sounds
>were the shuffling of my feet and the muffled clatter of a sixteen
>year old fridge engine that refuses to malfunction enough to justify
>replacing it.  Sometimes I know how it feels.
>
>I looked under the tree.  Nothing had been added during the short
>night.  If Santa had got this far south, I must have been listed with
>the naughty boys.  Once more there was no mysterious parcel marked
>'To Dennis'.  Another year gone,  and still he hasn't brought the
>cure.  I'm used to this too,  and I don't like it either.
>
>Outside the darkness begins to grey into day as I slowly make myself
>coffee and toast.  I can smell the coffee in memory.  I move coffee
>and toast and a large glass of orange juice to the table on the back
>patio. It is still very early, to early to have even taken my first
>meds, much less experience my first 'on' of the day,  so I move the
>items one by one.  It takes time - but what else would I be doing.
>The patio chair is cold and slightly damp, the table wet with dew,
>and the brick paving is strewn with the jetsam of yesterday's
>easterly off the desert  - Jo would hate anyone to see it like this -
>but at 5 AM I'm not about to worry.
>
>Watching as colour replaces that first grey light I alternately sip
>coffee and orange juice, enjoying the contrast, and think about the
>cure.    It occurs to me that after nearly eleven years of PD, god
>knows how many "wonder drugs'',  dyskinesia, a pallidotomy and all, I
>don't know what I mean by a cure.  I don't really expect that the
>cure will make me as new, and that it will be as if I never had PD.
>OK - fine - but what then do I expect.  Drugs that work with only
>minor side effects, surgery that works for everyone and fixes
>eveything.   I just don't know.  But I do know that whatever form it
>takes its probably 10 or more years away.  By then I'll be 58.  I was
>37 the last time PD was not a factor in my life.  No cure can give me
>back those 21 years;  no cure will  give me back the things my
>children and I were unable to do; no cure will erase 21 years of
>heartache from my wife's experience; no cure will reimburse me the
>lost income from what should have been my most affluent years.   NO
>DAMN CURE IS WORTH PUTTING MY LIFE ON HOLD FOR.
>
>Sounds only a 10 year old can make on christmas morning are coming
>from near the tree. I better get in there.  Later today there will be
>a huge meal to eat,  friends to greet and rivers to stroll beside.
>None of these things are concerned with the cure or even with PD in
>general, nor did santa have to leave them under the tree - they are
>here, they are now,  they are mine.  Cure or no cure - this year,
>next year, sometime,never - I'm going to enjoy what I have.
>
>        "Happiness comes not from having what we want -
>
>        - but from wanting what we have."
>
>Dennis
>
>
>*************************************************
>Dennis Greene 48/10
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>http://members.networx.net.au/~dennisg/
>**************************************************
>