It’s a New Year…

and it’s way past time for a catch up blog post. I think the last post of substance was about Giving Tuesday at the end of November, 2015! So this is my attempt to condense a couple of months of activity into one post. Not long after the Giving Tuesday post, we made an unscheduled trip to Traverse City, MI to help out Mara’s sister with her used book store. We have no retail experience and it’s been over ten years since I’ve worked a 40+ hour shift but we had a great time taking care of business. If you are in the Traverse City area, be sure and stop in at her store The Bookie Joint downtown just off Front Street. (yep, a shameless plug!)

We got home just in time to get ready for Christmas and enjoyed the holidays with our family and then it was time to start getting ready for THE BEACH! We arrived last Saturday and were awakened at 3am Sunday morning by the sounds of a tornado (I’ll be darned if it didn’t sound just like a train).  Luckily no one in our complex was injured but a lot of the units had windows and screens damaged and a lot of cars suffered broken glass and other damage.  We hadn’t planned on being part of the effort to prove the theory of global warning but we are thankful that no one was hurt and our unit and car were not damaged.

On the Parkinson’s front, I was appointed webmaster for the East Tennessee Parkinson’s Support Group and spent a lot of free time during December learning WordPress and upgrading the site to the latest version.  When that wrapped up early in January I spent my free time updating the Tennessee Parkinson’s Disease Resource site with maps and adding new information.

Somehow I also managed to take an exercise holiday and I began to notice my symptoms were getting worse, particularly the brady kinesia (ridgity).  Since we arrived in Florida, I have been walking at least an hour a day and we have signed up for two Parkinson’s dance classes  We are also planning to sign up for additional exercise classes at the Neuro Challenge Institute, a great resource for Parkinson’s Patients in the greater Sarasota area.  I am already noticing improvement which once again proves how important exercise is for PWP’s!  

We also signed up for a weekly Let Your Yoga Dance class. We were introduced to Let Your Yoga Dance while at the Kripalu retreat in October 2013 and this class reunited us with instructor/founder Megha and Joel and Melissa whom we first met at the retreat and meet up with every year while in Sarasota.  Our first class was yesterday and Megha had us doing deep breathing exercises, stretching and dancing in no time. It is a great class that not only provides exercise but brings ‘healing through joy’. 

Coming up we will attend the Neuro Challenge Insitute annual Parkinson’s Symposium on Saturday where one of the topics to be covered is the Tasigna trial conducted at Georgetown University.  Tasigna is a leukemia drug that appears to stop or reverse some of the PD symptoms during a small test involving 12 Parkinson’s patients.  I am looking forward to hearing more about the first trial and the results and will provide more information in the next post.

So there you have it, a short version of a very busy couple of months.  Oh, did I mention I am still wearing my smartwatch and providing data for the Fox Insight Trial?  If you haven’t signed up you can do it here, and don’t forget to also sign up for Fox Trial Finder at the same time and join over 52,000 of us who have already signed up!