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Hi everyone! I'm Bill, pleased to meetcha. I am 40 years old and have PD for 10 years now. Whomever Parkinson is he's welcome to have it back. Ha-ha? Seriously, I am going through a tough time now. At the risk of boring you, a litte background. Yes, I am young to have Parkinson's and it has progressed quite quickly, probably due to my being an ideal role model of what NOT to do. The stories I could tell you... After 5 years or so with PD I had to give up a promising career as an accountant, and a job I loved. Speaking of love, my wife was the ideal care giver up until we seperated about 18 months ago. Divorce is an unfortunately inevitable conclusion to our 20 years+ relationship. I still love her and miss her and my two sons tremendously. I blame myself,not PD OR her. Somewhere along the way her love died and she stayed longer than she should have. (Short break to cry and feel sorry for myself) Does anyone else get these damn mood swings? Depression has been a major problem for me. One attempted suicide before she left 3 since. She left a few weeks before I was scheduled for brain surgery. 3 days later I was in intensive care again and spent the rest of my wait in the psyche ward. I hid my recent history and had the Pallidotomy on one side. It was a tremendous success physically but was too late to save my marriage. I gambled away my share of our life long savings, ran up my credit cards to maximum then drove my beloved sports car into the lake. Back to hospital. Discharged, lifeon my own, too difficult, drug overdose. Discharged, erratic behaviour lead to being committed. After 80 days of hell, I finally turned to God for help and fought my commital and was released. My finances are controlled by a trustee, while I file for bankruptcy, await my divorce, living on my own is a challenge I try to face one day ata time. I feel I desperately need to have the Pallidotomy procedure repeated on the other side to cope adeequately but my doctors don't feel the risk is warranted. I am willing to put my faith in God to guide the surgeons hands and am not afraid to die. I do spend much of each day in fear of being unable to reach my pills or the phone... On the positive side I'm free (to starve or freeze to death; ha-ha) or die of loneliness (NOT suicide,I will NEVER give up). I go to church when I can, and write poetry when I'm inspired. There's something, I've dicovered an ability to write that combined with a great friend (with PD) who does tremendous abstract art has allowed us to form a very successful art exhibit we have displayed many times. We are in the midst of pulishing a portfolio of our combined work. We will soon be publishing a book. I did not write this to promote either I mention them as part of this much too lengthy letter. Perhaps some of you can benefit from this somehow, I thank you for your time.