My name is Felicia and I have Parkinson’s Syndrome (PD).
I'm still not able to say those words without having a feeling of disbelief.
I don’t want to say it out loud but I also do not want to deny the "truth".
I have Parkinson’s... and I’m fighting like hell to reverse the symptoms.
As of today It’s been four and a half months since I received the official diagnosis from Emory University School of Medicine at the Merrie Boone Comprehensive Care Clinic for
Parkinson’s Syndrome.
I've thought long and hard about where to start my story for this blog.
But with much assistance and conversation with friends and family, I’ve decided
to start the story where I felt the most hurt.
Let me take you back a few years...
Around 2016, Unbeknownst to me and my conscious self, my body
became acquainted with Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy, (aka) the heartbreak syndrome, (self diagnosis) which I believe led to the development of my Parkinson’s symptoms.
As best as I can tell from the copious pieces of literature I've read, the reasons for Parkinson’s are:
1. Qi and Blood deficiency caused by anger, depression, emotional stress, difficult/painful loss, deep sadness and resentment (this cause I identify with, as you will discover as you read on)
2. Bad diet, greasy fried foods, too many sweets
3. Overwork and insufficient rest
Now that we've gotten the formalities of PD out of the way I am going to share with you the painful and discouraging events that led up to me being diagnosed with it. I'll be referring to the syndrome in it's abbreviated form from now on,
Finding our new Forever Home
May 2013
It was around May 2013 when my husband took a trip to California for work.
While he was there he called me to say that he had just had an epiphany.
He shouted excitedly into the phone, “I don’t want to retire in Alabama! I want to retire on a beach along the Pacific Ocean!”.
I was like, “Yea! In Newport Beach?”.
Of which he replied, “Nope, it’s too expensive...".
He went on to tell me that he wanted to spend the rest of his life on this nameless beach relaxing all day in a hammock.
Well, I didn’t think too much more about it after we hung up because after all, in my mind there was plenty of Pacific Ocean coastline between Mexico and California that I was more than willing to call my future Sunbird home.
You can bet I was game for the adventure and so I quickly began to settle into the idea of us having a life like many of our retired friends who would go to their beach home during the winter months and return to the main home at the start of the spring and summer months, reuniting with family and friends.
When my husband returned home from his trip he began a methodical approach to
making his dream come true.
He got the travel magazines out and we booked trips to visit different
places with the Pacific Coast as a backdrop.
You would've thought we were newly weds backpacking around the world in search of their perfect Forever Home!
We went to Portugal, Spain, Brazil, France, Panama and finally Ecuador where we found a quaint stretch of property on the beach of a small fishing town.
The property was perfect! The view took my breath away and the expat community was welcoming; It was practically a small paradise.
I should have felt blessed and giddy to call this new place my Forever Home but for some reason the more than real idea of leaving the United States to live in Ecuador just wasn't sinking in.
I kept thinking, “This will be a vacation home where we’ll fly back and forth and, on occasion, have the family down for holiday.”
To be honest, I kept thinking I still had time to throw a bid in to live in my birth state, California.
It's amazing how delusional I was back then and how hard I fought to keep that
delusion alive as we got closer to uprooting out entire lives to move abroad.
Thanks for reading!
Please come back. I get into further detail about the start of my PD symptoms and the long road to finally being diagnosed.
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