Each year when November 9 arrives, I try to reflect on what ownership and
membership in the Parkinson's Information Exchange Network means to me.
Ownership still fills me with amazement at the worldwide need for
information about living with pd. What is also amazing is the
extraordinary amount of information distributed by the listmembership.
Membership gives me a feeling of kinship with people all over the world
whose faces I will never see and whose voices I will never hear.
It has been just over eight years since I heard the words "You have
Parkinson's". I am still working full time and today I got to hug all
three of my grandsons, Isaac who is 7, Jesse who is 5, and Tyler who is 7
weeks old and whose smile I saw for the first time today. Isaac & Jesse
(and their parents, daughter Laura & s-i-l Doug) arrived last Saturday
from British Columbia to stay with us until next Sunday. It has gone by
too fast. None of my grandsons will ever know the 'pre-pd me'... but
thanks to a lot of good information from you folks, I can still hold them
& visit the toy departments in stores & share pizza & games & stories.
It doesn't get any better than that!
I hope our list can continue to work together until pd is just a sad
memory. By working together, we are more effective in spreading the news
that pd can & will be erased with funding for research & with the freedom
of researchers to follow up the most promising leads. Let's continue to
give pd a 'face'...Michael J Fox's, Janet Reno, Muhommed Ali, Pierre
Trudeau, you & me.
I was reading some poems by Emily Dickinson & want to share this one with
you.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Never give up hope.
Barb
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Barbara Patterson [log in to unmask]
HSC 2J22 905-525-9140, ext. 22403
School of Nursing
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