Has anyone ever told you just relax , take a deep breath, and everything will be ok?  Has that been helpful?  When someone says “just relax”, it feels harder.  You think about relaxing and how you should relax. This causes you to tense up and feel more tension in your body. You tell yourself to relax, but your muscles are now tight and sore. Why is this so difficult?  I find that guided meditation and yoga helps me relax and breathe deeply.  

Here is a link to a guided meditation that I find particularly helpful. It’s only 15 minutes, so you can relax in a short amount of time. Enjoy!

15-minute meditation: Body Scan Piedmont Healthcare.

Have you read the book Ending Parkinson’s: A Prescription for Action? If you have not, you should read it this week. Dr. Ray Dorsey along with several other authors are taking action to advocate to increase Parkinson’s funding. Specifically, they have initiated a campaign to ask President Biden to increase the federal research funding for Parkinson’s, which is quite low.

If you register on their website, they will send you a letter that you can customize and then send to President Biden. It’s written, you just have to sign and mail. How easy is that? In addition to asking for increased research funding, the letter will ask President Biden to ban chemicals such as paraquat, chlorpyrifos, and trichlorethylene, which are in pesticides and increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease. Lastly, it will encourage the President to make Medicare’s coverage of telemedicine visits permanent.

There is also a live event on March 16th. I’ve placed a link to their website below. Please take a few minutes to read the information on this website. It is so important to participate in this campaign and to send a letter to the President. This is a chance to voice our concerns about research funding for Parkinson’s. We need a lot of people to send letters to make an impact. Please take a look at the website and register. Thank you for helping advocate to increase Parkinson’s research funding.

RED LETTER DAY!

Thank you so much for your continued reading of my blog. I am going to work on some marketing and other areas of the website for the next several weeks. So instead of new weekly posts, I will be writing a new post every other week. I hope you will continue to read, and comment when you feel moved. Thank you again for your support. Stay tuned. 

I am very excited because this website has had 500 visitors since September 2020. Thank you to everyone who supports me by reading my blog posts. Writing each blog post reveals something new to me. Thank you for your feedback and encouragement to keep writing. If you have any ideas you think I should explore, send me a message from the about page. I appreciate all of you.

I have done a lot of musical performances in my lifetime, most of them when I was younger.  Sometimes I was good and sometimes I was bad.  I played the mellophone in the marching band and totally loved it!   One particular Friday night we were marching the halftime show at the football game. We had memorized two shows.  One for the football game and one for the competition that weekend.  During one of the half-time shows, I kept turning the wrong way.  I was doing the wrong show. I could not stop marching to the competition showpiece.   We were marching the halftime show.  They were totally different!  OH BOY!  The director was not very happy with me that night. 

Parkinson’s can be a lot like marching band.  Every week there is a halftime show (show A) and a competition show (show B).  You have practiced both shows and your body memory will tell you the right one to march.  However, the body memory misfires and you are marching to the other show.  You know that you are supposed to be marching to show A not show B.  But, again, the body memory is marching to show B.  Doesn’t that feel like Parkinson’s?

Our mind tells us that the body should work one way.  However, the body has decided to behave differently. Sometimes, it changes every week!  The symptoms for the week keep us marching to a different drummer.  We can try to fight with the body and keep attempting to march to show A.  We can also accept that the body will be marching to show B for that day or that week. I’ll tell you that isn’t easy.  You want so much to be marching to the same show that everyone else is marching.  You do not want to march to show B alone.  The band is marching to show A.  You tell your body, “hey body, we are marching to show A”.  The body says, “sorry, Cheryl, we are marching to show B today”.  

What do you do?  The answer to that varies.  There isn’t a magic pill that will allow us to march to show A.  Some days are easier to accept that you are marching to show B.  Other days you are fighting and turning back every chance you get.  I don’t have a good answer to this problem. I just keep marching. I try to take each day in stride and remember that I can march to either show.  That’s Parkinson’s. You never know which show will be playing and how the musician inside will be performing. It may help to realize that there are two shows. Maybe, that will make accepting show B a little easier when your body decides to march that show.