My podcast about the weirdness of Parkinson’s

For the past- well, I really don’t know how long, but surely many months-I’ve awakened most mornings with aching legs. They feel as if I’d just completed a day of hiking the Blue Hills near my Boston home except all I’ve done to earn the pain is sleep.

I remember my mother kneading my legs with the appropriately named rubbing alcohol when I experienced”growing pains,” though now that I think of it, all alcohol might accomplish is drying out my skin. The rubbing part I get, though I wonder now if growing pains are even real. Should “medical myths” be a future blog post? But I digress.

It took a while for me to realize that I could remedy my current pain with, duh, painkillers. Perhaps I was reluctant to add any more pills to my daily regimen, as I already began each day with an assortment of ten tiny yellow, pink, blue, and white tablets. I ultimately concluded, what’s two more? Don’t people with arthritis take a daily analgesic? And that’s when the lightbulb illuminated my brain.

I’ve come to realize that many if not most folks who are old enough to collect social security also qualify to receive at the very least the occasional aches and pains stemming from age -related conditions. Compared to what some in my age cohort are dealing with, well, what’s some sore legs now and then?

There must be millions of sufferers, with myriad conditions, who emerge from the innocence of sleep, forgetting that their “condition” is about to hijack their momentarily pain-free body and transform it into the vessel that harbors the aches, scratches, and wounds that now take up an inordinate amount of real estate in their bodies.

The fact is, there are any number of maladies that visit millions of victims daily or close to it. Arthritis is a common one. A friend recently confded that he is plagued by Gerd, aka acid reflux. We commiserated- I have it too, and it’s rather hellish. I don’t have to travel very far to prove the axiom “bad things come in threes.” Arthritis too has put my wrists and fingers on the menu.

I don’t hear my stiff-jointed friends informing the world of their aching wakings like mine. So maybe I should just shut up, pop a couple deep turquoise capsules and turn on the heating pad.

My Parkinson’s does not make me any more special than my neighbor with Gerd. Same goes for my two friends with neuropathy, and another with diabetes. We’re all a bunch of sickos (sickies?) at this stage of life. Deal with it.

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