The Parkinson's Cake & its Unkown Ingredients

We’ve all had, or heard of, family recipes. Secret mixtures that have been in your family for decades. It’s something that you have exclusive access to solely because you’re in that family, and you know more about it than anyone else outside. I know my family probably has some sort of family recipe, but I think Parkinson’s disease can count as one, too. Since I am a part of the glorious Kadavil family, we all know a little too much about Parkinson’s Disease. My grandma’s had it for a long time, and with time comes a lot of learning. So today, I’m going to share this family recipe with all of you; many facts you might or most probably might not know about Parkinson’s disease, like it’s a cake.

Fact 1: Parkinson’s is very, very slow baking. I realized that my grandma has had it for over 20 years, but she didn’t even start exhibiting symptoms until I was a toddler, so 3-5 years into the disease. And even the symptoms are slow baking. The earliest sign — remember, I was just a kid, and my observation skills weren’t that great — I noticed was my grandma’s inability to walk. Because Parkinson’s disease makes you unable to produce enough dopamine in brain cells, you’ll face severe motor dysfunction. And this symptom was practically all I could notice for years.

Fact 2: MEDICINES. I later learned that one of the reasons I only noticed my grandma’s inability to walk as her sole obvious symptom of the disease was because my grandfather would give her medicines, and medicines, and medicines to slow the other symptoms. I still don’t know what most of them are for, and I heard my grandfather once say this story of how the cashier at a medical store shockingly found out that all the medicines my grandfather was buying for my grandma were for one person.

Fact 3: Parkinson’s disease makes everyone feel helpless. It’s like looking at a dish that went wrong, but you don’t know what to do about it. Once you progress into the disease further, the other symptoms show, and they’re just as rough on the Parkinson’s patient’s family as much as the patient themselves. Over time, my grandma became unable to eat and swallow food, but since Parkinson’s doesn’t have a cure (just make one already!), there’s not much we can do about it. So all we could do was keep on telling her “eat,” “swallow,” and “drink”; not to much effect. And my grandma couldn’t eat because she didn’t want to, but because her motor function had affected her ability to swallow.

Fact 4: It is very important to be organized if you’re caring for a Parkinson’s patient. Constant medications, meal times, more medications, and basic caretaking can all jumble up and become hard to stay on top of. My grandfather is the primary caretaker for my grandma, and he is literally the most organized person I know, which is probably why my grandma hadn’t faced severe symptoms until much later than doctors predicted.

Fact 5: If you get any other injuries while having Parkinson’s disease, it’s gonna be really bad. Parkinson’s slows your immunity down, and patients become bedridden, which increases the chances of bed sores. And if you develop a sore, it gets hard to get rid of it. Your healing process slows, but the pain increases. My family literally had to get a routine nurse to come over to our house to dress and clean my grandma’s wounds every week.

Fact 6: This will be the final unknown ingredient I’m sharing today: It hurts. Everything hurts. People seeing the Parkinson’s patient, the patient themselves; the pain they face extends to those they care about. When my grandmother passed away, it was incredibly difficult to cope with her death, and my only thought was not now, it shouldn’t have been right now, it wasn’t supposed to be right now. Living around a Parkinson’s patient means being constantly reminded of this impending doom, but it never makes you ready for it when it finally arrives.

So, I hope you all were able to learn something new about these ingredients in this family recipe, despite how intense they are, because, well, Parkinson’s is like that. Our family will always have a reality check, but still stay positive, still hope for the better, and I hope you can too.