Becoming Grandma by Lesley Stahl

Author:Lesley Stahl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-03-02T12:11:02+00:00

SIX

Macho to Mush

If God had asked Abraham to sacrifice his grandson, he would’ve said no.

—AUTHOR UNKNOWN

The day after Jordan was born, Aaron and I were in the hospital room when she started her first bout of sustained crying with that piercing, shrill wail that claws at a grandparent’s soul. Taylor was still in pain, so Andrew tried soothing the baby, walking her around the room. But that unbearably crushing shriek would not give up. I took Jordan in my arms, certain I could calm her, but alas, she just kept bawling till my skin peeled.

Aaron finally sat down in the rocking chair and said, “Put her on my shoulder.” He held her and rocked, and just like that she stopped crying. We joke that there are two benefits to Aaron’s having Parkinson’s. One is he can eat ice cream or anything he wants all day long and not gain weight; the other is that his soft tremor can put a fussy baby to sleep.

There came a time in 2008 when Aaron, a man of long strides, began walking stiffly and slowly. I noticed his left foot trembling and that his face had become increasingly expressionless. But my mother, Dolly, who also had Parkinson’s, was the first to say something. She diagnosed him.

Aaron’s doctor put him on dopamine pills, the standard medication for Parkinson’s, three or four times a day, and the symptoms subsided, but not entirely. And then he developed a facial tic: his mouth would spasm into uncontrollable contortions. The doctor called it dyskinesia. We would learn that the dopamine pills were causing the dyskinesia, a classic catch-22.

Five months after Jordan was born, Aaron and I were sailing in Nantucket. “Hey, you’re not ticcing,” I said. “Not at all.” It was the first time in over a year.

“I know,” he said sheepishly. “I took myself off dopamine.”

“What?” As we came about, I shouted into the wind, “You can’t do that.” If ever he forgot to take those pills, his stiffness and the tremors got worse. “You can’t go without dopamine. You need it.”

That’s when he told me he’d been off the pills for a full week and that his Parkinson’s issues had actually lightened so much that he felt symptom-free. And sure enough, he was walking at a normal pace. His scratchy, pinched handwriting was back to its old lovely cursive. Gone was the Parkinsonian mask that froze his smile. He even started driving again. I thought I heard the flap of angels’ wings. This was a miracle. It seemed impossible. With Parkinson’s, we thought, patients go in only one direction—worse.

We called his doctor, who urged Aaron to stay on dopamine anyway, which he refused to do. He was giddy with renewed vitality.

We had trouble getting a straight explanation for why his symptoms had all but disappeared. One specialist hypothesized he may have had Lyme disease or West Nile virus instead of Parkinson’s (not so); another proposed that it was “transient” Parkinson’s (whatever that is); yet another said there’s such a thing as a disease vacation.

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