Patience Pending

We people with Parkinson's are mavericks. We not only march to the beat of a different drummer, sometimes we don't march at all. In fact our theme song should be "I Ain't Marching Anymore" by Phil Ochs. Go with the flow? Not us. No flow, no go.


As members of a culture so manic that it has been forced to slice time into nanoseconds too small for any human to even perceive, we are the dissenting minority. While others multi-task all around us, texting their overfilled to-do lists to their partners while crashing their cars, we struggle to single-task, spending the morning buttoning our shirts or not tying our shoes.


This is role none of us are cut out for these days. Patience cannot be ordered over the Web and then delivered the next day in a brightly-colored Express envelope. Instead, we must learn it. And how do we do that?


Slowly.


Fortunately, we have many opportunities for practice. We spend countless minutes waiting for our meds to kick in. Dopamine brings a rush, but you can't rush dopamine.


Crossing a room can take on the quality of a major expedition, complete with danger. You may be in a hurry, but your feet are on their own schedule, and frankly, they're tired of being ordered around. They will get you there in their own sweet time. Push them too much, and you're going down hard, pal. They'll stick to the floor and you'll topple to their level with a thud that frightens everyone in the vicinity, with the exception of the mutinous extremities themselves. They're already safe on the floor. It won't be them that feels the pain. I don't know a single person with Parkinson's who has injured a foot in a fall.

So you learn not to rush your feet. They have the upper hand.

You want to practice patience? Try removing the cap from the bottle that holds the pills that enable you to take the caps off bottles. Hours of fun. The irony alone will amuse you for eons. Which is how long it will take to get to the pills.

The ultimate exercise for developing patience is the marathon wait for the cure. I remember a friend who bitterly observed that he had been assured that a cure was no more than a decade away. That decade has passed, and so has he. But bitterness sours the present for the sake of an uncertain future. So we need something to do instead of waiting. We have to work in the present to advance the progress toward the day when we can get back in the rat race with everyone else.

I'd love to just stop and smell the flowers, but ever the pranking poltergeist, Parkinson's even takes your sense of smell.