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Dear Bob and Janine, I've been grappling with your off-the-wall, unbelievable experience since you posted. To travel that far under normal conditions would be difficult. To travel that far and to be treated so poorly is inexcusable! For what it's worth, you two, I'd surely like to see what would happen if you sent your post to the doctor, the hospital administration and the state medical board. Are you game? With your permission, I'd like to share my entrance into the world of neurological "What do you have?" At some point in the Fall of 1995, my retirement year, not too long after school started, I awoke one Sunday out of the blue and couldn't move. Frankly, I was too mystified/petrified to figure time length-I'd had no warning signs. When whatever it was passed, my arms dangled at my sides like an ape's, my body was quite stiff and my ability to walk was impaired. I had classes to teach, and my 32nd year to complete. Prior to this experience, I'd had my yearly checkup. Since I had been diagnosed with Epstein Barr years before, had a few other symptoms to deal with and since tests came out ok, my internist figured I was just fatigued. At soon to be 65, I was doing the usual--working too hard. The one thing he didn't see was how I walked. How I did it I still don't know. It was a beautifully successful school year. Yet I can only remember praying that I could get from my classroom to the school library! It was the night of my retirement party, maybe six months later, that the doc saw me walk. He apologized profusely and said that we'd set up an appointment with the clinic's neuro. And so he did. By then I had checked medical books and knew my symptoms seemed to fit the PD profile. Loaded with the information I had, I went to my appointment. The doctor's name was Hope. That was all I needed. When he walked in, I said, "Your name is Hope and my name is Love. Perhaps together, we can discover what is wrong with me." He became infuriated. Life in the " little room" went down hill from there. I was "examined" for what should have been 20 minutes (I checked my watch). The doctor took off 5 of those minutes to either check a resource or to go to the bathroom. I'm not sure which. At the conclusion of nothing, he looked at me and said (and this is verbatim) "There's nothing wrong with you. You are old . Your body has taken some lumps. You'll just have to learn to compensate." With that, he left the examining room. I was stunned. By then in tears, I left the room with my good-old list in my hand. The next day, teary eyed I called my internist. What followed three months later was a 2 1/2 hour, extremely complete examination at the university neuro clinic where I was diagnosed as, "It could be PD." That was about 6+ years ago. Since that time, as most of you know, the Stranger Within is a no name, and as long as I, and others like me, are assigned to the PD umbrella, no one will ever find truth should there be such! That, however, is not the purpose of this epistle. My second neuro retired. Now, I am privileged to have an extremely intelligent, sincere, caring neuro who refuses no one, is ready to do anything for a patient during appointment time, but can seldom if ever be reached in between because of the need for this doctor's specially which is PD. Life isn't perfect. We are strange bedfellows. I'm a clinical study. This is a neuro I trust. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn