My husband and I were talking the other day when he mentioned that maybe I should write about how people get Parkinson’s in the first place. I asked him to clarify and he said that sometimes people with PD feel that they have the disease based on choices they made in life. It’s not that they think they’re being punished, but that career or perhaps lifestyle choices may have given them this illness. While there may be some truth to that concept, no one in their right mind would ever choose this pathway in life. It’s just unthinkable.

There isn’t a test that can tell us when my husband first “caught” PD. Was it exposure to pesticides when he was working in the orchards as a young man? Or, was it an injury he sustained while in the National Guard that led to this diagnosis? Was it something he did, something that was done to him, something he accidentally experienced along the way? My point is, he didn’t ask for this diagnosis and would never have made an intentional choice with a known risk of Parkinson’s Disease.

I get angry at times when I see how his diagnosis has impacted us and the changes it continues to bring to our lives. We both say freely that this isn’t how we pictured our retirement years, yet I never blame my husband for what we are missing out on and, more importantly, he shouldn’t blame himself. He did not choose PD, it chose him. I chose him too, and if that means we live with PD then so be it. All blame for the difficulties we face falls on the disease itself, not on my wonderful husband who lives with it.