I’m reading two books at the moment. The first is Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. The second is When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Both, in different ways, tackle the subject of death and try to contextualise the experience.
Messing up the bucket list
Every so often I revisit my bucket list. I remove activities that seem less interesting and re-prioritise the remainder. Often I just simply delete existing activities. If I haven’t got round to doing them in the first 60 years of
The Joy of Science
I was not always a person with Parkinson’s. For more than two decades, I was a scientist. Better than that, I was a neuroscientist. And better still, a research neuroscientist. And to be a research neuroscientist in the 1980s and
Let no day be wasted
I don’t know about you but most of my New Year resolutions are broken fairly swiftly. In the case of those involving chocolate, fairly instantaneously. My children have even taken to hiding the Bendicks bittermints from me, fearful of their
Arizona Mike
In downtown Grand Rapids Michigan, opposite a hipster coffee shop somewhere around the intersection of Monroe and Lyon you will find him. Usually alone. Sometimes in conversation with other street people. Mostly just whittling wood all day long, fashioning canes
3AM in Michigan
It’s 8 am. Which would be fine if I was where the 8 AM was, if you see what I mean. Kent, in the south-east of England. But I am in Grand Rapids Michigan where the time is 3 AM.
Exenatide – royal hype or real hope?
I’ve seen enough false dawns to take a jaded view of new breakthroughs in Parkinson’s – and with good reason. People with Parkinson’s have lived with the same tired handful of medications for too long; our best drug therapy, levodopa,
The price of victory
The reaction of most people to a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease is one of distress. Distress at the darkest imaginings of what the condition might bring. And distress at a future that would likely be much shorter and harsher than
The flame that burns twice as bright…
Let’s start with the basics. Tom Isaacs, president of The Cure Parkinson’s Trust and co-founder of Parkinson’s Movement died unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago. For CPT and PM, the loss is particularly acutely felt. Over the last many days
How to survive retirement
When I was a child, my enduring impression of retirement was one of paralysing boredom. I saw ancient wrinkled creatures who, having earned their retirement through years of hard graft, simply had no idea what to do with the time