Two small potatoes about my life with Parkinson’s disease.
Throat catchers: Is it me, is it Parkinson’s disease, or does this happen to everyone? It seems like every time I eat popcorn or raw almonds that have skins, tiny food particles get seriously stuck in my throat. Either that plastic-like hull from the popped corn clings to the lining of my esophagus (think: the crunchy armor of a cockroach’s abdomen), or else the almond skins do. I don’t recall this happening in my pre-PD days. It irks me like crazy, and I need more than a few swallows of water to flush the pipe.
Mind sucker: This blogging website has taken over my mind, my free time, my life. Right now I should be cooking dinner, but I feel compelled to sit at my laptop and spin out the first draft of this post. After dinner I’ll stay up past my bedtime to revise and burnish it. Remember Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey? He’s staring me right in the face. In truth, I need to cut back on this blog and spend more time at the gym; last week, over Spring Break, I hardly worked out at all. But I know that even when I come home from the gym, I’ll log on to blog faster than a frog jumps from a log in a bog. When chased by a dog. In the fog.
An interesting question to pursue: Why am I so drawn into this blogging process? (The process: Come up with topics. Draft and revise. Get the best free-use visuals. Revise some more. Perk up the verbs. Do all the behind-the-scenes “Search Engine Optimization” stuff. Tweak the text even after it’s published. Reread my previous posts and find errors I overlooked. Lather, rinse, repeat….)
Search me! Go right ahead!
I once had a nightmare and woke up gagging, dreaming I was eating shredded wheat breakfast cereal dry, with no milk. Yes, I have the same problems as you. The swallowing problems and gagging really get to me.
I have problems swallowing sometimes, and redirecting all the saliva that accumulates in the front of my mouth. I guess these count as small potatoes like you say, but it’s the constant little things that wear me down some days. My body’s turned into a theme park of tiny maladies and sometimes I just want to go home.