Patience

I think I was perhaps ten years old when a man came to my elementary school for assembly. He stood behind a table on which he had placed a large box. It's hard to remember the dimensions now, but I'd say maybe two feet by three feet. He asked us to call out some numbers, fiddled with a few knobs, and after a bit the machine spat out beige colored punch cards with the answers to the calculations he had fed it. I certainly didn't know what it was at the time; looking back on it now though, I realize that it was a rather large calculator. Then he told us that by the time we got to college machines like the one on the table would be small enough to fit in the palm of our hands. His prediction came true but much earlier than he had guessed. It was certainly well before I got into college because I remember buying my mother a calculator as a Christmas present about two years later.

Technology often surprises us by advancing a lot faster than we think it will. Unless, of course, it doesn't. At the time I received my PD diagnosis, Michael J. Fox was testifying before Congress to request full funding of the Morris K. Udall Research and Education Act. Ten years for a cure, was the phrase bandied about at the time. Well, it's been close to ten years and no cure. And ten years is a long time to wait when the cure is more than an abstraction. So if we didn't make it in ten, how much longer? Another ten years? Twenty? Three? Who knows, and at some point I just stopped thinking about it. It was too hard.

From the day of my diagnosis, I was obsessed with the research being done in the field, and even participated in a "very promising" clinical trial involving neuro-immunophilins. Well, the results turned out to be not so promising after all and the trial was dropped. At some point, I just got tired and decided that instead of focusing on research I needed to focus on living my life and leave the research to the researchers. Now, however, it appears that I'm ready to get back in the ring, but in a different way. Just what that way will look like remains to be seen. But we all need to stand for something, or stand up for something, and apparently this is the something that I am meant to do.