Peggy, you are an astonishing woman. I read your post with tears in my eyes and thought of the similar route that I'm going through on my own. You give me courage to take the next steps. I'm now enrolled in five clinical trials. But none of them involve brain surgery. I vowed when I started on this route that I would never take pills or have surgery as part of being part of the tests. The next thing I knew I was in a study that involves having a spinal tap. That wasn't bad at all, which opened the door to even more experimentation. Now I'm in one study that involves taking increasingly large doses of pills over three months. And three functional MRIs during the same time frame. My husband is also involved in some of these tests as a control so he has spinal taps and FNMRIs as well. He claims he would rather have a spinal tap over an FnMRI any day. I don't mind either one. The pills in this particular test are given to Alzheimer's patients and now they are testing them on Parkinson's patients to see if they will have any effect on our ability to remember. That is, will they slow the onset or progression of dementia. my latest federal study is with the NIH and that will start in May. I'm not sure exactly what they study but they will have me come back over nine years. So it's got to be something longitudinal.

How did I decide to get involved in all of this stuff? I thought well, somebody has to do it or we're never going to find the answers to this problem. It seems to me that there are multiple causes for Parkinson's and multiple iterations of Parkinson's so there needs to be a rather large group of people who are willing to put their lives on the line to find answers through research. I figured that since I'm already 67 and I have no one directly relying on me, I'm a little more disposable than people who have small children or growing families. I have children and grandchildren as well who are of course at risk for having Parkinson's and in my family ALS as well, so if we can find answers in my generation, perhaps our next generations won't have to deal with it.

My glass is lifted with yours "TO THE CURE!!"