These two blokes have a few things in common. They’re both ex-servicemen, don’t mind a few beers of an evening and they both have Parkinson’s Disease.
John Morris misses the deep blue sea. He’s ex-Navy, trained as a submariner and later a shipmaster who was diagnosed with the debilitating disease some 10 years ago.
“Of course they take all your tickets and licences off you when you are diagnosed with Parkinson’s, so I haven’t been able to do what I love since 2003,” Mr Morris said.
Peter Dorman is an engineer who loves working with his hands. Days out from his 50th birthday, he was dealt an irreversible blow; being told he was suffering from Parkinson's Disease.
“I had it a couple of years before that but it takes a long time for them to work out what it is… Mine started with slowness of motion, I would be in the car and it would take me so long to do my seatbelt up.
“I suppose at the beginning it was a bit of the old “why me?” but all I could come up with was “why not?” Mr Dorman said.
Parkinson’s Disease is a chronic progressive, incurable and disabling neurological condition which is characterised generally by movement. It is the second most common degenerative neurological condition in Australia – affecting up to 80,000 Australians.
Parkinson’s Queensland’s client services co-ordinator Christine Bruinsma says at least 17,000 of those affected live in Queensland.
“There is currently no cure for the disease but the research community are doing all they can to find a cure into the future. While we cannot promise there will be a cure tomorrow, without the support of the community there would be less information available and few support groups,” Ms Bruinsma said.
Mr Dorman says statistics show that there may be 15 to 20 people living in the Whitsundays with Parkinson’s Disease and it is for this reason that the Guardian met with the two men at Cannonvale Library on Monday morning.
“It’s very hard to accept when you are first diagnosed, because you don’t know what to expect and soon everything starts to get worse. Your movements become more sporadic, it took me an hour to get out of bed, then another hour for breakfast, basically your whole life changes,” Mr Dorman said.
Mr Morris’s experience was equally daunting.
“There’s a level of embarassemnt I suppose. You might get the shakes when you go into a supermarket and people look. Mine was a bit different to Peter's where my condition wasn’t so much slowness, but sudden movements. My wife had to hold the plate down for me sometimes so I wouldn’t send it flying across the room,” Mr Morris said.
After several years treatment on a drug called Sinemet which artificially replaces dopamines in the brain, both John and Peter underwent surgery called Deep Brain Stimulus (DBS) which involves inserting a neurostimulator, to stimulate the target area and block signals believed to cause the disabling motor symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease.
Both men say they are now able to drive, where they weren’t before and their quality of life has improved greatly.
“I know when I was first diagnosed I wouldn’t have gone to a support group … but I certainly would now … I suppose if there had have been a support group here we both might have had the operation a bit sooner,” Mr Morris said.
In conjunction with Parkinson’s Queensland, the two men are calling for expressions of interest to establish a support group right here in the Whitsundays.
The first meeting will be held on Friday morning, August 17 at the Uniting Church Hall in Proserpine. “John and I only became friends because another bloke told me that he had the same condition. Before that I hadn’t really spoken to anyone who understood what I was going through … and that is really good especially when you are faced with something like this.”
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