First, I have to describe the work experience of my wonderful wife. Through most of her professional career as a librarian, she has been engaged in the training of medical professionals in the use of medical databases. This also means that she is an expert at using medical databases to find information.

Beginning about 3 months after my post about the fall I had off of the front porch of our house (almost 2 years ago), I began having symptoms that, to me, were strange and imho hopefully reversible.

I hid them, as best I could, from everyone, until about a month ago. I was going into our kitchen to refill a cup of coffee, with my favorite coffee cup. Instead of putting the coffee cup on the kitchen counter, I dropped and broke it, right in front of my wife. She asked me what was up, and I honestly told her what was going on.

About a week later she came to me with a concern of hers. She’d run my various “weird symptoms” through the medical databases she had professional access to, and her concern verified something I’d privately been concerned about for over a year.

I may have trauma-induced Parkinson’s Disease.

Of course, only an official medical professional can make the diagnosis, but the fact that I have a history in medicine and my wife is who she is, and we both reached that conclusion independently makes it somewhat more likely.

To let you know, there are two different strains of Parkinson’s. One is trauma induced, and the other is ambiguous in origin. An example of the first is Muhammad Ali – the professional heavyweight boxer, and an example of the second is Michael J. Fox – the actor. Both strains are called Parkinson’s Disease.

I have no intention of asking my Veteran’s Administration Primary Care doctor to verify this. There is nothing she could do to reverse it, and I don’t care to submit myself to the required tests to verify it. Let’s be realistic – if Muhammad Ali can’t afford to get it reversed, it can’t be. The man is among, if not singularly, the greatest and most successful professional boxers in history. I’ve admired him since I was a teenager. In addition to the fact that there is nothing to be done about it, there is my personal conviction that “life is what it is” – and I will not bankrupt my wife to treat something that can’t be fixed.

I can still have many years of useful life helping my wife, and I can think of nothing better to do with them. So far, my symptoms are still mild, and mostly manageable. I can live with that.