Hometown Clinton - Fall 2017

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'If I knew ten years ago what I know now,’ is
something we often tell ourselves. Some of that
knowledge can only be gained through living it
because when we hear it, it seems so ordinary
and unnecessary that we can hardly give it our
attention long enough to even hear it, much
less take it to heart. Nevertheless, I’m going
to share some things my life and my life with
Parkinson’s has taught me.
-Adele Hensley
When
the Rain
Comes:
Making Sense of Parkinson’s Through the Written Word
by Johnny Lowe
Adele Hensley lives in Clinton with her husband Frank
and son, Clark. The above paragraph is from a blog Adele
posted April 17, 2015. Ten years prior, at age 38, she was
diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson’s disease.
From unabridged Merriam-Webster:
Parkinson’s disease – a chronic
progressive neurodegenerative
disease chiefly of later life that is
linked to decreased dopamine
production in the substantia nigra,
is of unknown cause, and is marked
by tremor of resting muscles, rigidity,
slowness of movement, impaired
balance, and a shuffling gait.
From parkinson.org (National Parkinson Foundation):
When an individual is diagnosed with PD before the age of
50, the disorder is called young-onset Parkinson’s disease.
The disease affects people in different ways, as actor
Michael J. Fox, who also has young-onset Parkinson’s,
noted in his book, Always Looking Up. “One of the biggest
revelations was, in spite of all our common travails, how
different our experiences could be. Parkinson’s disease
takes many forms—for some reason, everyone gets their
own version. A drug therapy or surgery that works for one
might not work for another. Our reactions—emotional,
psychological, and physical—vary greatly, and this obviously
affects our ability to cope,” says Fox.
The exact cause of Parkinson’s is yet to be determined, and
there is no known cure at present. The disease itself does not
kill, as Adele noted on her blog, but “it dismantles almost
every single one of a person’s abilities until independence
becomes a distant memory.”
At one point, Adele began thinking about how she could
best explain to her son Clark, who was 3½ when she was
diagnosed, what was happening to her. “No matter how
dramatic the drugs or the treatment,” she said, “nothing that
we have available now is ‘disease-modifying.’ This means
that the existing treatments treat symptoms, but they cannot
address the cause or the progression of anyone’s case of
Parkinson’s disease.”
34 • Aug/Sept/Oct 2017
Hometown Clinton • 35