Synch or Swim, A Temporal Tantrum

Parkinson’s Disease affects your senses of smell, taste, balance and, this just in, your sense of time. 

For example, here it is, more than halfway through 2025 already! If you blinked, you missed it. Simultaneously, it also feels like it has been 2025 forever, and it should be much later. How can this be? A little-known and poorly understood effect of PD is a warping of the time-space continuum. Time is out of joint. As the world speeds up, the average person with Parkinson’s is slowing down.

What else could you expect of, say, a 66 year-old man, who is a veteran of 23 years with Parkinson’s Disease? Such a person should slow down, no? I shouldn’t be risking my hips riding my bicycle in Anchorage traffic. I shouldn’t be attending protest marches and rallies. I shouldn’t be playing mandolin in an Americana/Honky Tonk/Irish band, and I shouldn’t be writing this blog. I should sit down (or fall down) and act my age.

But here’s the rub: How will I know what age to act? I feel a hundred years old when the meds aren’t working. My walk becomes a shuffle and my voice a whisper, but when the meds kick in, I feel like a youngster of 60. Then, they blink off again and I am jumping back in time to the toddler stage, furniture surfing so I don’t fall down on my way to the bathroom. Then the aches and pains of the elderly remind me that my toddlin’ times are a thing of the past. I try to live in the present, but it’s tough when you are whiplashing back and forth through time, one more disorienting gift of PD.

Einstein taught us time is relative. Parkinson’s Disease could have told him that. A journey I used to complete in seconds can now take me minutes as I walk, stumble, freeze and shuffle down the hall to answer the doorbell. It can take even longer if I fall on the way.

By the time I make it to the door, sweating and disheveled, the earnestly concerned missionary who rang the doorbell minutes ago to bring me the salvation of the word has given up waiting for me and gone on down the road to save the lost soul next door. Just like that, I have missed my chance at redemption, and am bound for the lake of eternal fire to roast forever and ever. Thanks a bunch Parkinson’s, I will see you in Hell.

by Peter Dunlap-Shohl
NW Parkinson’s Blogger and Person with Parkinson’s

“It is the work of the creative to be a prosthetic imagination for the distracted and the dull”
– Maxwell Hubert Maxwell, playwright, butterfly collector, amateur surgeon and snob.