The Impatient Patient - a Column by Doc Irish

I returned home from the Parkinson’s Policy Forum in Washington, D.C., feeling two things at once: encouraged and unsettled. I felt encouraged because I was surrounded by passionate, committed people — advocates, care partners, researchers, clinicians, and people living with Parkinson’s disease — all working or change. I…

There’s a famous thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus. You replace one plank, then another, then another — until none of the original planks remain. The question is: Is it still the same ship? In living with Parkinson’s disease and building Brain Storm — a brain-training…

When you live with Parkinson’s disease long enough, you start to notice a pattern: The hard days rarely begin with some dramatic crash. They start with something subtle drifting out of alignment. The step is a little shorter. The timing is a little late. The hand doesn’t want to…

There’s a moment in every close basketball game that feels almost supernatural. The clock is ticking down, a desperate shot goes up, and in the space of a heartbeat, the whole arena goes silent. The ball is in the air. Will it go in? That thin slice of time —…

Live with Parkinson’s disease long enough and you start to notice patterns — micro-misfires that add up to lost rhythm. A foot hesitates at a doorway. A hand reaches, then forgets what for. The world is the same, but it feels misaligned — as if a few coordinates in…

Many ancient civilizations believed that the Earth was flat. This worldview was tethered to the simple, familiar image of a flat plane with edges you could fall off. Of course, the Earth was never flat, but thousands of years ago, it may have seemed that way. That was the…

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting your local Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), you’ll understand the following metaphor. You walk in with the faint hope of progress. Maybe today will be different. Maybe the line will be short. Maybe the system will work. Maybe, finally, someone will call…

There’s a particular kind of fear that creeps in when living with Parkinson’s disease. It’s not the shaking or the stiffness that haunts me the most; it’s the quiet dread that my own mind might one day turn against me. Not in some dramatic, movie-style way, but in the…

We all age, but some of us — human or not — seem to do it a little faster. Our dog, Jax, turned 10 this year. He’s a cockapoo mix with an easy smile and a heart big enough to stretch across our entire household. For most of his life,…

Living with Parkinson’s disease means constantly negotiating the unpredictable: tremors that come and go without warning, stiffness that turns a short walk into a major expedition, fatigue that hits like a wave. It’s easy, almost automatic, to want to handle it all quietly. I don’t want to be a…