By Linda Lee Albert
My husband, Jim, had no
intention of retiring. He was never a man who longed to replace his office
for the golf course - who pictured himself leaving his
native Michigan for warmer climates. He was a man who considered it a worthy challenge to
maneuver his car without mishap in the kind of lake effect
snow and ice for which we were famous, and who never looked
out the window during our very long winters and fretted over
the gloom and absence of sun for which we were also well
known.
For the first seven years
after his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease at the age of 58,
Jim barely turned a hair. He had climbed to a successful enough place in life
to satisfy himself; found a comfortable plateau in his
profession managing a small stable of real estate holdings
he had developed, and was content to stay there for the rest
of his life.
Then one day, things changed. He felt stiff and lethargic in a way he had not
previously experienced. His optimism was suddenly no longer in evidence. His belief in his ability to make good decisions
disappeared. Trips to his neurologist did nothing to
reassure him, even though the doctor was convinced there was
no particular change for the worse in the progression of his
disease. We were
bewildered, and Jim was beginning to be frightened.
Fortunately, our
son-in-law, Andy, a clinical social worker, took it upon
himself to do a search for us on the Internet. According to what he found, 50 percent of Parkinson’s
patients will be fated to undergo a clinical depression at
some point in the course of their illness, with the symptoms
imitating the Parkinson’s symptoms themselves, so that a
diagnosis is very difficult to ascertain. No failing on the part of the person suffering
through this is to blame, we discovered - not even the pain
and disappointment of having to deal with a progressive
physical disease - but rather, the compromised brain
chemistry itself was both the primary cause and the
potential remedy
Neither my husband’s
internist nor neurologist had alerted us to this
possibility, but once armed with information, we were
ultimately able to find a neuro-psychiatrist who aided us in
understanding what my husband was going through, and who
reassured us that Jim could be helped. The doctor prescribed Wellbutrin, an anti-depressant,
to give my husband what he called “a floor” on which to
stand emotionally, and encouraged him to get back into
living his life as fully as possible.
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