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I recently returned from Providence, RI where my son received a MA from Brown University. It was a windy and rainy day in the San Francisco Bay Area when I returned. My wife and I were sitting at the kitchen table getting caught up on happenings when we started to hear, plop, plop, plop, plop - that all to familiar sound of water dripping. Looking closer, sure enough, water was dripping from the ceiling fan. There wasn’t much we could do that night except place a bucket under the fan to catch the water. The next day was a sunny California day. I ventured into the attic to assess the damage. The roof leak was maybe four to six feet from the gutter so the space in the attic was limited. I needed to get the insulation batting out so it could dry. This would allow me to see how much water was actually on top of the ceiling sheet rock. Well, I got the insulation bating out and was cleaning up the water on top of the sheet rock when I started to have what I thought was an asthma attack. I started gasping for air. This triggered dyskinesia. Thus here I was, somewhat stretched out in a low roof area having an asthma and dyskinesia attack. The asthma and dyskinesia were increasing in severity. I had to get out of there, down a latter and into my office for a nebulizer treatment for asthma. As I crawled out of the confined area I tried to stand and immediately fell over very dizzy. Slowly a stood up again this time hanging onto rafters and any other thing I could find, yet I fell one more time before I arrived at the latter. Jane, my wife, was at the foot of the latter wondering what was happening. By the time I reached the bottom of the latter my legs were like Jell-O. I was gasping for air and my dyskinesia was awesome. I tried using the nebulizer for an asthma treatment. It did nothing. I tried a second nebulizer treatment - nothing it may have got worse. I tried blue glasses, laying on the floor, applying pressure to my head - all in hopes of reducing the gasping for air and dyskinesia. It is hard to think when all hell is breaking loose, but I wondered if my asthma attack was asthma or if I was hyperventilating. I remembered a trick taught as a child for hyperventilation. Just breath into of a paper bag. This would reduce the oxygen slowly and bring hyperventilation under control. I said to myself, why not try it -- nothing else was working and the dyskinesia and gasping was getting worse. As soon as I started to breath into the paper bag my symptoms started to subside. It took about a minute of this breathing to reduce the gasping problem and reduce the dyskinesia to near zero. This was a fantastic feeling. In all the years I have had PD never have I heard of hyperventilation being a side benefit. Yesterday, Dr. Robin Fross, a consulting neurologist to Kaiser Parmanente in the Bay Area, spoke to the Young-Onset support group. On one of her slides on anxiety was Dyskinetic Hyperventilation. It feeds on anxiety and the wrong medication. I am telling this story so that others might benefit from my experience. We do know that anxiety can heighten dyskinesia and hyperventilation. A simple solution for me was the old hyperventilation trick learned many years ago -- breathing into a paper bag. It sure worked for me. The cost was one I could afford also. Regards, Alan Bonander