Hi ho! I ho! It’s off to court we go!

…I was questioned on the witness stand for three hours… I was tired, weaving in and out of the haziness of levodopa and the speediness of seligilene; and the risk-seeking compulsions of Mirapex. The tremors were starting, and soon they would shake me off the chair, onto the floor….
They were very kind to me, at the courthouse. They knew about Parkinson’s and how it affects me, and they treated me with the utmost respect…

…It was very, very hard for me to go to court. It took weeks. Stress is deadly when channelled by Parkinson’s...

Maybe it is not true that we can or should participate in the activities of society. Maybe it is doing no one any good for us to encourage Parkies to come out of their isolation.
Maybe isolation is tranquility we need.
Maybe trying to be part of something is what kills us.
…We demanded to be treated “just like everybody else”. How’s that for self-delusion? Just like everybody else? We are not like everybody else.
Are we “differently abled”?
Sure, but we are also really screwed up….
We are dependents, not equals.
Whose testimony will be believed, in any trial? The Parkie -vs- the Normal?
Parkinson’s changes cognition. In the brain and the nervous system and the muscles, lots of things are going wrong. Is the testimony of a Parkie as valid as the testimony of a Normal?
Am I a credible witness? Do I understand the questions? Do I understand the relationship between questions and answers? Do I understand the passage of time? Do I remember what happened? Do I see the same cause-effect patterns that they do? Is something being lost in the translation? How can you believe a brain-damaged real estate salesman when all the other witnesses are so elevated over time and space that they are never on the wrong side of history: the people who have the power to know things “beyond a reasonable doubt”.
(The above is an excerpt from Chapter 48, http://parkinsonsdance.blogspot.com/...hapter-48.html
but most of the chapter is not about PD so be careful and delete when you start to get offended.) But do not hesitate to comment, even if very critical. It was my first time ever in a courtroom, and it was not a good place to have Parkinson’s. Anyone had experiences like that? Where you are expected to be “normal” but it is very hard to do well because of the disease?)

As a land surveyor I was an expert witness in more cases than I can count. It was my favorite role and I enjoyed it thoroughly. But, as you probably noticed, it can get stressful when you have a team of intelligent and well paid men trying to subtly show that you are an idiot. The last time I was involved in a case, the attorney on our side explained that I had PD. I confess to having used that to gain sympathy. But it was, indeed, the last time and I yielded the role to younger men.

So what is our role in society, you ask? I suggest that it is the same as that of the canary in its cage deep in the mine. We are saying with our bodies that something is very wrong and society had best pay attention.

Dear Bob,

I think if we could see the energetic and psychic impact interacting with people really looks like we'd be amazed at how deeply we are connected. I was a defendent in a lawsuit regarding a historical land survey where our land , water well and potentiallly our home were all at stake and the strange thing is that pd sx became evident for me at the time the neighbor who sued us moved into our area-long story but i will also say after a long protracted suit once settled and they moved away I started feeling so much better - the pd sx abated dramatically
I did ok on the stand for the most part but the prosecuting attorney was kniving and expert on pushing buttons and finallly got to me. Court rooms are full of REPTILES!
PD does make stress visible as Rick says...canaries in a mine....and beware the psychic influences that also are at play -sometimes i wonder if there are some ammong us who could cure their sx by leaving a stressful marriage, neighborhood, job etc. we are walkingg biofeedback machines indeed!

....that moon daughter would have had to deal with such a rare experience as a boundary dispute and would have been on this forum when the subject came up? 'tis an odd universe. [I would have enjoyed helping you beat that carpet bagger, BTW]

Good observations on stress. One of our number (Harley?) was going through some unusual testing and was hooked up to monitoring equipment when the physicians noticed that every time her significant other came into the room that there was a strong negative response within her. Ending that relationship greatly improved her symptoms. A lot of PWP (young onset in particular) seem to have spent a lot of our lives putting other people first. Maybe a part of us gets tired of that and rebels any way that it can. Take that a little farther and you could see a lot of our symptoms as the outward manifestations of inner conflicts. Tremor. Rigidity. Slowness. -Rick

Being a serial plagiarist, I would like to post these responses on my site, giving credit to this Forum. They are staggeringly good responses, as happens so often at Neurotalk.

It might even attract some new blood.