James Parkinson: 198 years on April 11th is World Parkinson's Awareness Day. Yippee. I'm so thrilled, I can hardly stop yawning. This is gonna be a bit of a rant, but sometimes you have to call it what it is. In the infancy of my husband’s Parkinson’s, I used to think ‘why doesn't anyone connect the concept that all movements stop during sleep…there must be an answer there’? Sweetly naïve, wasn’t I. Of course that was a life-time ago (actually, I do exaggerate – like to put it down to being numerically dyslexic), but really it’s a mere 15 years; just seems like a lifetime. The sleep thing is sorta moot these days anyhoo. Pete (hubby with the ‘Shaking Palsy’ – I’ll get to that later) doesn’t sleep much – in fits and starts – at his desk – face in his dinner. Wherever, really. And if he sleeps it’s fairly tormented by REM sleep disorder and RBD (REM behavioural Disorder), apart from those odd moments when he enters the paralytic stage; REM – the fifth stage of...
