PERSONAL STUFF

Well, I have fussed as much as I can over my next lecture, in which I confront the very difficult first chapter of Capital. The high point of the lecture will be my imaginary field trips to a medieval Catholic Cathedral and a contemporary supermarket, the rationale for which I think I have already explained. I stayed up late last night watching Serena Williams play her last match, an emotionally rather wrenching experience. And of course, I have been keeping track of the steady march by the Justice Department toward indicting Donald Trump. But none of that is what has really been occupying my mind lately, and I thought I would take a few moments on this Saturday afternoon to write about what has been concerning me. This is quite personal and will be of almost no interest to all of you who comment on politics and such like things on this blog, but I would like to memorialize here what has been going on in my mind. It concerns my ongoing struggle to come to terms with my Parkinson’s disease – to come to terms with it both practically and also emotionally.

 

I have never been any sort of athlete, heaven knows, although 75 years ago I was a member of a gymnastic team in my high school called The Captain’s Corps.  We worked out on the parallel bars, walked around on our hands and such – not very impressive stuff – but I gave all that up when I went to college and that was my last encounter with organized athletics. Still and all, over the decades, I did the Canadian Air Force exercises, swam each morning in the pool I had built in my Massachusetts house with the proceeds from a successful textbook, and when I retired and moved down to North Carolina, I began a regime of daily early morning walks which I kept up for than 10 years. When Susie and I bought the apartment in Paris, I began taking a one hour walk each morning around the fifth, sixth, and seventh arrondissements, some of which I memorialized on this blog.

 

I continued the walks when we moved to Carolina Meadows five years ago and it was a point of great, albeit rather sophomoric, pride that I became known as an early morning walker. I got to know the other early morning walkers and also their dogs and it helped me to deny that I was in fact growing old. Then, a year and a half ago, I developed a tremor in my left hand and after consulting three neurological specialists, looking for one who would give me good rather than bad news, I was finally forced to accept the fact that I had developed Parkinson’s disease.

 

I had seen several people here at Carolina Meadows in the last stages of that terrible disease, bound to a wheelchair, virtually immobile, looked after by their husbands or wives, and although my symptoms were quite mild, I struggled terribly with the fact of my diagnosis. But I continued to take my morning walks, pushing myself to get my heart rate up because of literature I had been given to read by a physical therapist that indicated that 30 minutes of aerobic exercise five days a week seemed to have the effect of slowing down the progress of the disease.

 

Then, last October, disaster struck. At the end of one of my walks I developed what is called “festination” which is an uncontrollable ever more rapid walking in which, in effect, your feet run away with you until you fall. I stumbled into the lobby of the building where I live, half fell against the wall, lowered myself slowly to the floor, and could not get up until two security guards saw me and helped me to my feet. My early morning walks were over.

 

I bought a recumbent exercycle and began doing 30 minutes on it five days a week, something that I have kept up faithfully ever since. But I grew more and more unsteady and began to develop what the doctors describe as freezing and stumbling as I walk, particularly when I am turning around or trying to make my way in the apartment from our bedroom to my bathroom or from the kitchen to my study.  I began to use a three wheeled roller which I now take with me everywhere I go.

 

At first, I was embarrassed, ashamed, terribly self-conscious about the fact that I was using the roller, even though in a retirement community like this one a great many other people use similar devices.

 

Little by little, I have started to make accommodations and adjustments in my life in response to the limitations imposed upon me by the Parkinson’s. I have begun to take advantage of the transportation service offered to residents here, both for myself and for Susie.  Several weeks ago when I had some physical therapy sessions, the transportation folks picked me up in front of our building and took me to the health center so that I did not have to park and walk to the building.

 

I have already talked about the fact that the course I am teaching meets not in the philosophy building, which at UNC Chapel Hill is completely handicap inaccessible, but across campus in another building which has a handicap accessible entrance in the rear. To help me with the frustrations and complexities of navigating the UNC website and associated services and to assist me in the classroom posting slides on the screen in front of the blackboard, I hired a young man who has just completed his doctorate in philosophy and who recorded and posted on YouTube my lectures on Marx, Freud, and Kant.

 

All of this is of course relatively trivial and hardly worthy of much comment, except that it has been extraordinarily difficult for me to accept the fact that at the age of 88 with Parkinson’s disease, I can no longer do what was easy for me to do even five years ago.

 

One of the lesser effects of Parkinson’s is a condition called micrographia. My handwriting, which was never very good, has become so crabbed and unsteady as to be unreadable.  Since I never did learn to touch type, I have spent my entire life typing with my two forefingers but the Parkinson’s and the associated tremors make that so random a process that I cannot rely on those fingers to write anymore. Fortunately, there are dictation programs that are really quite good and so as I sit here at my desk, I am speaking into a headphone and writing on the computer much faster than I ever could have before.

 

Because of my condition, which is progressive and not curable, and because I am also the principal caregiver to my wife, I decided to sell our Paris apartment so that we would have the money we will need for ever more extensive care as we grow older. My neurologist has been encouraging – she says that the principal threat to my well-being at this point is my age, not my disease. She expects that I will have 5 to 7 more years perhaps before I am really constrained by the disease, and since at that point I would be perhaps 95 years old, if she is correct I cannot really complain. (Well, to be honest, I can complain and I do so to myself a good deal, but that is neither here or there.)

 

I appear to be cognitively undiminished, but everything is harder for me now and takes me longer. I do not think I could teach two courses or more at the same time as I did without the slightest difficulty during most of my career.

 

But I do not think I shall go gentle into that good night, and I shall most certainly rage against the dying of the light. Meanwhile, I keep my spirits up by imagining Donald Trump indicted.