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On Being a Successful Parkinsonian by Bill Harshaw Few of us know how we would react to having a new companion join us uninvited in midlife and stay on regardless of the fact that we wsh him to leave. Perhaps a real world analogy will make my point more clearly. Most of us remember Day of the Jackal, a thriller about the terrorist Carlos, who was responsible for many political assassinations, but evaded capture for over two decades. Imagine being told that you were Carlos' next target. How would you react? How would your family and friends take the news and the wait until he takes a shot at you or he is captured? In this parable Carlos is Parkinson's, we are the target and the medical community are the police. Once we have Parkinson's, after taking some basic steps to mitigate the symptoms, we should get on with our lives rather than devoting precios energy to things that won't make a difference. Humanity always surprises and astonishes tself by doing the unexpected. Those everyone thinks will bear up well under adversity don't and vice versa. As you get used to having Parkinson's as a lifelong companion and you learn to anticipate its responses to th way you do things, there will be more time available to read and think, to formulate answers to questions like "Why me?" or "Why not me" or to think about a topic you haven't considered before. We usually think of Parkinson's as a debilitating movement disorder, which, of course, it is. There is hwever, another dimension. While movement becomes more constrained, a patient has two courses of action open to him: to passively accept the changes pD has wrought in his body; or to actively explore the question: "What new freedom do I have that I did not have before?" As the body becomes less flexible, the mind can become more subtle and discerning as it comes to terms with Parkinson's. I do not mean to belittle the restrictions PD puts on the patient or ignore the ways it can disrupt the lives of caregivers. Instead, if you can recognize that, along with physical constraints, there are new freedoms that can truly liberate your spirit, you release yourself frm the bondage of Psrkinson's. In the workplace, my manager was convinced by my tremor that I had a drinking problem and was all set to send me to the Donwoods Institute, a substance abuse treatment centre. He hadn't bothered talking to me about the tremor, and in any event wasn't the sort of fellow who le the facts influence his decisions. I ultimately took my case to the Chairman of the Comany. There was a very positive aspect to having to explain that Parkinson's was the reason for my tremor. For the first time, I thought thrrough the imlications of PD, for me and my employer. If the mild social embarrassment of appearing perpetually hungover was all there was to PD, we would be fortunate indeed.