Tremr

Its nearly a year since I started this blog with the grand ambition of making it a shared platform for anyone whose life had been touched by Parkinson's. I was thrilled that several people accepted my invitation to contribute and I'm very grateful to Linda and Tricia who were generous enough to submit their respective stories [ 1 , 2 ] which you can still read today. My host site, Blogger , makes it possible to create a shared blog along those lines but I hadn't realised how complicated that process was. If there is anyone who would still like to contribute, I'd be delighted to help with that but I appreciate why the complexity is off-putting. I was reminded this week of something that Linda wrote on the Facebook group where I met her around the time when all this started. In one thread she said that she believed that Parkinson's had brought out a creative streak in her. My initial response was to question how a degenera...

I was privileged to be part of the inaugural Sport Parkinson's Try-athlon last Saturday, 24th July 2021.  Privileged because it gave me the chance to meet so many whose competitive spirit is undimmed by Parkinsons and watch them take their opportunity to shine. Privileged to have been welcomed to the line up of Shaketar Dontask , a team of players who I had only met via Zoom a couple of days previously. A great bunch of lads and great players: Stuart, the goalkeeper who had to put aside his walking stick then pulled off a string of amazing reflex diving saves; Richard who covered every blade of astroturf and was 100% committed in everything he did; Sam, who brought us together and read the game perfectly so that he was always there to intervene with a well judged tackle or pass; Gary, who always made himself available for a pass before jinking his way through the opponents defence with his close control; Stu, always finding the right positions an...

I guess that anyone with any experience of Parkinsons is familiar with dopamine. It (or the lack of it) is the root of the condition. The NHS website describes it succinctly: Parkinson's disease is caused by a loss of nerve cells in part of the brain called the substantia nigra. This leads to a reduction in a chemical called dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter, that is, a chemical that stimulates neighbouring cells to transmit messages around the nervous system. Just about everything our bodies do depends on communication from our brains so as these transmitters diminish, we can expect all manner of symptoms. I delayed speaking to my GP for several years after noticing that I was finding it more difficult to move my right hand probably due to fear and denial. I think it was my wife who persuaded me that I really ought to have it looked at. I asked for an appointment to see a GP at my local surgery b...

Since being diagnosed with Parkinsons I have been touched by how many friends and family have donated to and raised money for Parkinsons related charities. At some point I made a mental note that I should return the favour for another charity one day. As the new year dawned I checked my Facebook feed and up popped a challenge from Diabetes UK: UK Wide Cycle Ride . The idea is that you choose a distance that would take you from one side of the country to another and to spend April accumulating miles toward that total and to gain sponsorship as you work towards that goal. I hadn't come across it before but I think a lot of charities also do something similar. Image by Ricarda Mölck from Pixabay Anyway, I hadn't made any New Year's resolutions, I've always enjoyed cycling and I've seen the serious impact that diabetes can have on families so I signed up albeit for the shortest available distance: 120 miles. That wo...

I got my first dose of the Astra Zeneca vaccine yesterday. There was a steward to let me in to the health centre, another to guide me to my seat and tell me when it was my turn for the pre-assessment, another to greet me to the area where I was to wait for the jab itself and finally, one to check me out. As it turned out, the whole operation was so slick that I didn't have time to sit down in the second waiting area. I checked my watch as I left and it was only five minutes past the time of my appointment. I was hugely impressed and grateful once again to our National Health Service who this week learned that they would receive a paltry 1% pay rise after a year of unprecedented stress. The justification that the economy is under extreme strain might be understandable if our government hadn't squandered billions by handing contracts to third parties with no history of healthcare to procure personal protective equipment (PPE) for NHS staff that had to be discarded when it was ...

Over the past few years my taste in music has changed quite a bit. My preference has tended to be for guitar based music but lately I have preferred to listen to electronic, often quite repetitive music. I have occasionally wondered if there was some sort of link between the way that Parkinsons affects the brain and this change of perspective. Of course, people change their mind all the time about music but this switch coincided quite closely with the first of my symptoms to manifest themselves and has been quite radical. Those early symptoms left me with reduced motor skills on my right side. It is interesting (though probably coincidental) that the word motorik which is often used to describe a 4/4 beat used in electronica actually translates to 'motor skill'. I joined the Reddit Parkinsons group recently and they have been very helpful and informative with their replies to my questions so I thought I would chance my arm and ask if anyone had a similar experience. The...

I started making some playlists of Parkinsons related videos to add to the new Tremr YouTube channel today. In one of the videos as Michael J. Fox goes out to meet other Parkinson's patients he describes each patient as having their own version of Parkinsons. I think that sums up the weird cocktail of symptoms that affect us quite well. In my version, a lack of dexterity in my right hand is what brought the disease to my attention and more recently I have noticed that my smile has become more crooked and that my right leg lags behind more than it did. Eventually I got round to searching " asymmetry Parkinson's ". I seem to have spent a lot of time discussing unknowns and riddles in my entries so far so it wasn't a huge surprise to find the top hit is a paper titled " The mystery of motor asymmetry in Parkinson's disease ". The abstract goes on to discuss the unknown cause of this asymmetric onset. The reality is that, even with recent strides i...