Rabbit Holes

Living with Parkinson’s: “Martin” and the Masked Barista. And owls.

/ Mark Sloan / 2 Comments

I’m at a coffee shop in Missoula, Montana, with Elisabeth. (Yes, I live in coffee shops.) We’re waiting to have lunch with our son, John, who is dutifully working the morning away at his tech job down the street. Elisabeth is reading about owls, or serial killers, or something about politics. (She’s bit of the omnivore, reading-wise.) Eventually she’ll start talking to me about what she’s learned, and pretty soon I will have acquired a new factoid that I will store away for possible later use. Like, did you know that some people think owls aren’t really that smart? Seems to be a brewing controversy. Well, there you go.

“Martin,” hard at work in Missoula…

I am enduring, yet again, the small, daily insults that the combination of Parkinson’s Disease and poor hearing can inflict on a person. A sparkly-eyed, curly-haired, Covid-mask-wearing barista named Sandra takes my order from behind the coffee shop counter. She leans steadily forward, politely trying to hear what it is that I’m mumbling. (It doesn’t help that the coffee shop is filled with atomic-bombishly loud music that reduces human-to-human communication to a series of more-thunderous-than-the-music roaring and awkward pantomime.) I lean forward too, trying to catch the gist of Sandra’s replies, because her mask eliminates the possibility of lip-reading, a skill I’ve acquired by necessity in recent years.

After a couple-three tries, featuring a goodly amount of gesticulation to go along with my PD-ravaged vocal entreaties, Sandra catches on that I am asking her to make a cafe latte for me and a chai latte for Elisabeth, and to fork over one of the cinnamon-cardamom morning buns in the glass case to her right. She nods, smiles – at least I think she’s smiling – and asks what name she should call out when my order is ready. “Mark,” I bellow, drawing out my name as “Mmmmmark-kuh” to ensure accuracy. Sandra smiles again. “Okay,” she shouts, “Thank you, Martin!”

I don’t catch this until the name “Martin” flashes on the order screen, freezing me for a moment – am I paying for some other guy’s coffee? Elisabeth, patient as always, explains the Mark/Martin thing to me, and I see that I am left with two options: a) I can repeat my name, louder this time, at the risk of sounding like an old crank yelling at the neighborhood kids to turn that damned music down!; or b) I can, just this once, shut up and be Martin. I choose the latter course of action.

“Come along, Martin,” Elisabeth says, giggling, as she leads me to a table. She finds it all quite funny, says she’s always wanted to date a guy named Martin, and now, hey! Opportunity knocks. We pick a table in a far corner in vain hope of a less-jarring musical experience and wait to be called to the pickup counter. “Stay focused,” she says. At least that’s what I think she says.

A few minutes later Elisabeth elbows me and points toward the counter where our drinks sit, cooling. “Your order’s up, Marty,” she shouts in my better ear. I rise and go fetch to the sound of more giggling. She’s enjoying this way too much.

Report from the Sonoma Wine Country Games: Battle of the Shot-Put Titans!

/ Mark Sloan / 10 Comments

Well, that’s quite the eye-grabbing headline, now, isn’t it?

The reality is somewhat more sedate and less bang!/pow! than I may have led you to believe, though. Because, after all, what is senior shot-putting but the solo, semi-leisurely tossing of cannonballs, accompanied by grunting and howling, among grown (often overgrown) men and women? The NBA finals, it’s not. The Olympics? Hardly. On the Spectator Excitement Scale, senior shot-putting is just this side of snail-racing. Except, perhaps, for the competitors’ loved ones, a few dozen of whom gathered last Sunday in the shade of a huge oak tree at the Santa Rosa High School shot-put area in Santa Rosa, California – my home town – to cheer on their elders.

Case in point: Elisabeth Face-Timed our kids and her mom so they could watch my performance live. By the second round of throws, everybody had hung up, with not terribly convincing requests that she send them a video if I won.

I can’t say I blame them. Or Elisabeth, for that matter, for not arm-twisting them into staying on the phone. My poor spouse…there were 22 other guys throwing in the men’s shot put. I was in the second flight, which means she had to sit, wilting devotedly in the heat, through the entire first flight – 15 aged, beefy guys, 90 throws in all – before I ever entered the ring. (“It was bonkers,” she confided later, after driving home with the AC kicked up to “polar vortex.”) She tells me I owe her big for this, and who am I to disagree?

But, hey, I won.

A re-enactment. (Don’t try this at home.)

Okay, truth be told, I didn’t whup all 22 of the others. We were spread over a half-dozen age groupings (the youngest competitor was 50; the oldest, 84), putting shots of different weights (the older you get, the lighter the shot – one of the rarely mentioned benefits of living long enough to watch your body crumble). My group (70-74 years old) consisted of me and two other fellow-graymen: a friendly former coach wearing Velcro braces on his trunk, both knees, and both elbows, and a short-ish man with very long, well-muscled arms and huge, powerful hands. He had clearly not spent the last 40 years trying to coax kids into letting him stick a flashlight into their ears with promises of Hello Kitty stickers.

But I knew I had it won by my third throw, not because I heaved it out of the park, but because one of my competitors – the former coach – had already withdrawn, citing aggravation of an unspecified-but-probably-already-splinted injury. Meanwhile, the man with the big hands was visibly drained by the heat, his distances steadily decreasing with each round. He spent the time between throws in a camp chair with ice packs on both knees and the back of his neck.

And me? Well, my Parkinson’s was on its best behavior that morning. I felt energetic and relatively spry for a change. My balance was okay, but not so much that I dared to attempt a glide – that backward sliding motion that was standard shot-putting technique back in the day. To avoid an unsightly tumble, I just stood there and chucked the thing.

To my surprise, I later learned that I’m currently ranked 24th in the U.S. in my age group, and 5th in California. This sounds pretty impressive until you realize there are only 37 guys ranked nationally in my age group so far this season, which means I’m pulling a C-minus if we’re grading on the curve. (Whatever. I’ll take it.)

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that I’m #1 in my age group for People with Parkinson’s. Maybe we should have our own Olympics.

Rabbit hole No.1 : Senior shot-putting

/ Mark Sloan / Leave a comment

Back in my very first post I said, “There’s more to life than Parkinson’s.” My symptoms are currently in what I’d consider the moderate range – mainly gait- and balance-related issues. But I can still get around pretty well, and I still have enough energy to explore other interests. So, from time to time I’ll drop a “rabbit hole,” a non-PD post, as a change of pace. Here’s my first (not counting the one I wrote about my Covid experience, written last month while in the feverish grip of the virus…).

To paraphrase (and mangle) the British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), “In the Spring (a young) an old man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of (love) tossing cannonballs.” Yes, that’s right: this coming Sunday, June 4th, will mark my return to senior shot-putting — after a five-year absence — at the Sonoma Wine Country Games in Santa Rosa, California.*

Senior (in high school) shot-putting, 1971

As I mentioned in my “About Me” post, in 2013 I ranked in the top 50 worldwide in the 60-to-64 year age group. This was helped in large measure by the fact that 99+% of guys my age grew up and quit shot-putting a long time ago. But still…

Senior track and field is a hoot. As you’ll see if you ever attend a meet, there’s all kinds of emeritus-athlete stuff going on. It starts early in the morning: you’ll see gray-hairs (and no-hairs) stretching, jogging, throwing heavy things, warming up for the pole vault, doing run-throughs in the long jump pit. Old friends gather in the stands over coffee and stopwatches. Complaints of sore joints and pulled muscles are met with knowing laughter. I love this stuff.

I’m not expecting too much from myself this year. I don’t like to make pre-meet excuses, but hey, here they are: My training schedule, laid out with such precision in early March, has been sabotaged by two rounds of Covid, Achilles tendonitis, a family medical emergency, the ravages of age, and, well…Parkinson’s. I’ve only been able to throw the shot twenty times or so, and my coordination and timing are way off. So, if I drop the shot on my foot and break it (the foot, not the shot), you’ll know why.

Okay! Enough with the moaning! I’ll post updates as the track season progresses (or doesn’t…)

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*The reason for the five-year hiatus is pretty simple: you hit a new age group every 5 years. I turned 70 this year, meaning in June I’ll be among the youngest competitors in the 70-to-74-year-old group. One thing that senior track teaches you is that it’s good to be “young” – almost all the records are set by athletes in the first year of an age group, before the march of time marches right over you. I competed at 60 and again at 65; not wishing to witness my own interim deterioration, I took a five-year snooze both times before coming back. I’ll probably do that again once this track season is done, resurfacing (hopefully – knocking on wood as I write this) as a boyish 75-year-old.

At long last – Covid

/ Mark Sloan / 4 Comments

Starting day 3 with Covid, and I’ve got to say…it’s not fun. I have what’s considered ‘mild to moderate’ disease at present. Mainly bad cold stuff, dominated by a world-class runny nose (more like a sprinting nose), sneezing, sore throat, a hacking cough, body aches and big-time fatigue. I’m typing this at one-third my usual hunt-and-peck pace, which means I’ve gone from slow to glacial.

Me, just now…

I’m surprised it’s taken this long for the virus to mow me down. During the early days of the pandemic I was teaching in the pediatric clinic at the Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency*, where I was the pediatric director until my retirement last year. We’d go see kids maskless (we didn’t know any better at first), and often times the child or parent would be sick with cold symptoms, coughing all over us. In retrospect, a lot of them probably had Covid, but somehow I managed to dodge that bullet – repeatedly.

Since then I’ve learned a lot about staying Covid-free. Masks, gloves, eye shields, and Covid vaccine and boosters galore… I retired a year ago figuring I’d beaten the whole thing. Then last week my wife, Elisabeth, came down with it and three days later – despite masking and isolating from one another – it was my turn.** Not sure where we got it, but one thing’s sure: Covid is one tricky, patient virus.

Anyway, that’s enough whining from the patient for now. I’ll be back soon with another post, this one about the upcoming World Parkinson’s Day…

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* Hey, kids! If you want to grow up to be a truly excellent family physician, the Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency is the program for you. Great residents, great faculty!

**Please understand, I’m not blaming my beloved. Elisabeth has been way more careful with masking in public than me – kind of ironic that she caught it first…