 |
 |
Copyright ©1999 The Harfolk Press This work is copyrighted by my business name, The Harfolk Press. Conseqently, I must insist that you do not make any copies, except one for your own private use. If for any reason you want more thanone copy, send me an E-mail with the details and I will give your request prompt and serious consideration My Second Life Chapter Two - Part Two LEARNING THE WORST (cont'd.) At work, things were not going well. I began as a Supervisor in Canadian Corporate Credit, with the understanding that once I picked up the Bank's way of doing things, I would move over to Corporate Banking, the marketing arm, which was where the action was, and related more to my previous experience. For reasons that were never clear to me, that move never came. Sometime in the fall of 1982, I had told my manager at the Bank that I had Parkinson's. He reacted with indifference. "It's not a problem now. Let me know when it starts to effect your performance." I had built up telling him into such an important episode, that I felt really let down. I thought, it just goes to show that everyone is making a mountain out of a molehill about Parkinson's. My first manager was, by the standards I had been previously accustomed to, detail-oriented and continually checking up on me. He was typical of middle managers in the Bank. The Bank was unlike any other place I had worked. Coming from Molson's, and indeed, from all my other jobs, the culture shock was serious. I had been used to setting my own priorities and working in an open environment. Now I had to get used to the way the Bank was organized and managed. A financial and lending institution as large and geographically diverse as Scotiabank must be centralized. And centralized it was. I was grappling with overlapping problems: learning to adjust to the Bank's business culture, my new job and trying to deal with an uncongenial boss, and at the same time learning to cope with Parkinson's, while keeping it a secret from everyone who did not need to know. In retrospect, I realize what a tremendous mental strain it was trying to keep those balls in the air. I also now know that my biggest mistake was to keep Parkinson's a secret. In the first place, I am not a good liar, and since you have to tell different stories to different people and remember them, the mental effort is colossal. The other consequence of secrecy and denial is that you eventually remove yourself from reality and live in a fantasy world. If the rest of the world perceived that something was wrong with me, I separated myself from everyone else by saying, "No, nothing is wrong with me. Your perception of me is incorrect." It doesn't take much imagination to see that this sort of behaviour, if carried out at the extreme, can be psychotic and very dangerous. By removing oneself from reality, you live in a fantasy world, alienated from society. That is what denial does and, for a time, it did it to me. My denial was based on a simple fatalism: the progress of Parkinson's was relentless and inevitable. If the cause was unknown and there was no cure, then why not just do nothing and ignore it. The problem with fatalism is that it breeds ideology; indeed it is an ideology. It was easy to be seduced by this simplistic approach to Parkinson's; conversely, it was hard not to be captivated, particularly as I hated my job. I thought, I will just stay put in my life. No one seemed to care, except Esther, and she was doing nothing but read articles about Parkinson's. I think I ignored them because they offered some hope when, increasingly, I only wanted unremitting despair. Meanwhile, Esther was ready to devote more time outside the home. She had developed a serious interest in public education and decided to run for school trustee in the municipal elections. One of the things that had spurred her on was when her mentor, the former mayor of Toronto, and now a Federal MP, David Crombie had told her, "You will have more influence, and have a better chance of being a positive force for change at the School Board than a backbencher in Ottawa, or even a cabinet minister." On November 12, 1982 Esther was elected a Public School Trustee on The Toronto Board of Education. It gave her a new lease on life, just at the time I felt my lease had been cancelled. I enjoyed the excitement and activity of the campaign, but after it was over, life settled down to the drudgery of routine for me and the challenge of being a practising politician for Esther. A few months later, in January, 1983, Esther's father died, just three months short of his eightieth birthday. Neither Esther nor I realized at the time what a watershed event this would be in our lives. In the fifteen years that we had been married, I had developed a very warm affection and friendship for him. The Archbishop - despite my close relationship to him I always called him Archbishop Clark or Your Grace - was kind and thoughtful. He helped me maintain a balance as my relationship with my father went from bad to worse. In the summer of 1980, he had written in a letter to me, "I still don't understand what makes Jim Harshaw tick ... but a final break is very final and should be resorted to only after full opportunity has been allowed for the matter to die down." I had not realized how close Esther had been to her father. For her, God died, or at least went into a coma, when her father died. Esther had set standards for herself that were unattainable. As long as her father was alive, this did not pose a problem, because the standards were based on him. But after his death she had great difficulty finding a balance between her ideals and what she could realistically attain. In the fall of 1983, Dr. Macdonald started trying out some medications on me. I had been diagnosed for about eighteen months and was becoming increasingly frustrated. I was pretty testy at the now standard question from people, "What's wrong with your leg, Bill?" Acquaintances were frequently pointing out that I was no longer my usual jolly self. After one such observation, I said in frustration: "Goddammit, even Santa Claus isn't in a good mood all the time! Why should I be?" Secretly, during the long nights when I didn't sleep, the inevitable questions would come to mind: "Why me, God? What have I done to deserve this? It's a hell of a punishment. Was I that bad?" The answers were some time in coming, in fact they still are. Every three months, I saw Dr. Macdonald and he prescribed pills which were mostly useless (Symmetral, for example) and, in one case, worse than useless. Cogentin was supposed to ease the tremor, but a side-effect screwed up my vision so badly that new glasses were rendered useless in four months. I would throw my glasses on the floor in frustration. This would not be the only time the side-effects of drugs proved to be intolerable. Finally, he put me on Sinemet, the major anti-Parkinsonian drug, which seemed to work. It is not unusual for a Parkinson's patient to have adverse reactions to a medication. The possible side-effects are usually discovered during the clinical trial phase of a drug and their existence is disclosed in product monographs so that all physicians can be aware of them before prescribing them. Many are no worse than an upset stomach for a few days, but some are very serious. For instance, L-dopa-based medications can cause hallucinations and other psychological reactions in patients. That is why neurologists are leery of prescribing regular doses at the beginning. Perhaps the reason for these adverse reactions is that the brain goes from a dopamine deficiency (characteristic of Parkinson's) to a dopamine surplus with various side-effects. The majority of which are not serious - mild nausea, drowsiness, headaches - but some are intolerable. L-dopa was first introduced in 1967. It revolutionized drug therapy for Parkinson's, replacing medications based on alcohol extracts from various herbs and plants, even from the deadly nightshade. The drug based on elixir of nightshade was supplemented by white wine, charcoal, bread dough, sawdust and nutmeg. L-dopa was able to cross the blood-brain barrier and effectively replace some of the dopamine that had been lost. The adverse reaction that goes along with it is dyskinesia, literally "bad movement" involuntary fragmentary, jerky or incomplete body motions. It can be mild, or extreme, taking up a radius of two and a half feet. In the late winter of 1984, Dr. Macdonald said at what turned out to be my last appointment with him: "I am referring you to Tony Lang at the Western. I refer all my difficult patients to him." It is a measure of my paranoia that I felt abandoned, deserted. I recognized Dr. Macdonald was a good diagnostician even if his manner of relating to me wasn't the greatest. I trusted him and felt he was looking after me well. I knew I was a bit aggressive sometimes, but was I really all that difficult? In fact, although I didn't realize it at the time, Dr. Macdonald was doing me the one of the greatest services a doctor can do: referring a patient whose care is beyond his ability to another specialist. His choice of words that day left something to be desired. What he meant was that my case of Parkinson's was difficult, not that I - Bill Harshaw - was difficult. But that was not what I understood at the time. It was now two years after my initial diagnosis and the symptoms were very obvious. Parkinson's had advanced to my left side. Its progress was like a regiment on a slow march to the beat of its own drummer. I had tremors in both arms and I was dragging both feet. To those who asked, I would say the same sort of thing I had been saying for three years: "I sprained my ankle skiing", or "Damn jogging, gives me tendonitis!" Hiding my tremor was another matter. I used the old hangover excuse to anyone who asked. One Sunday at Church there was a visiting priest who told us during the coffee time after the service that he was on his way to an assignment in San Francisco. His behaviour seemed a bit off the wall, but Cranmer's phrase that the church should welcome "all sorts and conditions of men" presumably applied to the clergy as well as to lay people. He said to me "That shaking of your hands looks to me as though you did some pretty serious drinking last night. Do you have a drinking problem?" My friends were shocked by his comment and the off-hand way he made it. We were not surprised when he turned out to be an imposter. I kept on exercising every day, cross-country-skiing in the winter and canoe tripping with Howard in the summer. On the canoeing expeditions, Howard increasingly carried the organizational load, and a larger part of the physical burden. It was sometimes hard on him, but there were no complaints. Esther had told him he was to take control. I had to keep coming up with a positive answer for myself to the question: "Can I still do it, or does Parkinson's make a difference?" For about five years, until 1986, I kept on pretending that if it made a difference at all, it only slowed me down a bit. That was all there was to it! Most of the time I felt alright, or so I kept telling myself. A curious thing about Parkinson's, or at least my version of it is that it is not a physically painful condition. I might trembling or immobilized but no pain was associated with these conditions. Mental anguish was another matter. One thing I did not do at this time was have anything to do with the Parkinson's Foundation, the organization established to provide support for Parkinsonian's and their families and to raise money for research into Parkinson's. Having taken a fatalistic approach to my condition, when I wasn't denying it, I decided I didn't need any help from fellow-sufferers. Besides, someone had said to me, "I wouldn't waste my time going there...run by a group of well-meaning matrons...meetings pretty depressing...nothing worse than a group of Parkinsonians..." It was several years before I began to appreciate the value of the Foundation and the support it could offer. Gradually I realized that I was seriously, chronically, depressed, but I did not entirely know why. Dr. Macdonald had not picked up on this. Again, in retrospect, the reasons are obvious enough. The shock of being told I had a chronic progressive neurodegenerative disorder inevitably had negative implications, not only for my own quality of life but for the well-being of my family. Would I be fired from the Bank for having Parkinson's? Was my job performance adversely affected by it? Were my compensation increases and promotion limited by Parkinson's? These all contributed to an external reasons for being depressed. But there was an internal or biological reasons as well. The chemical balance of the brain is altered by Parkinson's because of the dopamine deficiency. This deficiency in itself leads to depression. So, I had two reasons to be depressed. Three, really. I hated my job. It was very dangerous at work for me because Parkinson's was causing significant problems at work and my silence about it was a contributing factor. A departmental reorganization had taken place and I had a new manager. If my first manager had been a problem for me, my second was a disaster. We had a basic personality clash, and he was "on my case" from the first day. He was a Maritimer of modest background and similar ability, who had by dint of hard work and long hours progressed from being a Scotiaplan loan inspector in rural Nova Scotia - a quite big fish in a smallish pond - to a senior post in the Bank's high profile Corporate Banking Division - a largish fish in a huge pond. But he was a small town boy at heart, and he was uncomfortable in Toronto; what is more, he deeply resented those who were at ease in the financial centre of Canada. Stupidly, I had not told him about my Parkinson's. My first performance appraisal from him was as negative as it could possibly be, down in the "needs improvement" category. Everything from poor work to insubordination was mentioned. This was serious business. Then to cap it off, he said to me, "About your drinking problem. I am arranging for you to attend The Donwoods Institute - a substance abuse treatment centre - so you can come to grips with the excessive drinking you do." I was shocked. It is true I had drunk too much in my latter days at Molson's, but that was a thing of the past. For one thing, I no longer could afford to drink at lunch or after work - my salary at the bank was twenty percent lower than at Molson and the bank did not view social drinking as a business expense. For another, much of my youth had been spent coping with my father's drinking - he had been an alcoholic and I had the scars to show for it. I was determined that Howard and Emily would not have the miserable childhood I did. Howell Raines, in his book Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis writes, Fortunate is the man who cleans up his act soon enough that his children's memories of him won't be fodder for their therapy sessions. My manager's comments made me feel helpless. It took me some time to realize that I was the author of my own misfortune. By not saying anything about Parkinson's at work, by actively denying I had any serious problems, I had set myself up for the worst of all possible worlds.