This is a time of year when we are urged to remember distant friends and those less fortunate than ourselves. That seems to me justification enough to draw your attention to this little book, written by an old friend of many years’ standing who has the misfortune to be able to offer, as her strapline indicates, ‘an inside view of Parkinson’s disease’. Now in her seventies, Sarah Nock has suffered from this complaint for a third of her life, though it remained undiagnosed for the first 10 years.

That, and the rather prosaic title, hardly suggests the bright, informative approach or the effervescent humour that she brings to the subject. This is not a gloom and doom book, but one which sets out to explain just what being a Parkinsonian entails. This is necessary for several reasons. One is that media reports about stem cell research frequently lump the condition together with Alzheimer’s; though both affect parts of the brain, Parkinson’s does not entail losing one’s marbles – indeed, it is thought principally to affect the more intellectual part of the population. Another is that the symptoms include both loss of balance and a tendency, when emerging from an attack, to say odd things – rather as one might when waking from a particularly vivid dream – so that the sufferer might easily be regarded as drunk or mad, or both.

It is with such reactions in mind that Sarah aims to explain what is happening to her, since she is in no position to do so when undergoing an attack. Her method is to draw metaphors, often from well-loved children’s stories, and these, like the concept of ‘being squeezed by a Giant Hand’ on the cover are ably visualised by her illustrator Hans Diebschlag throughout the text. For narcolepsy, the tendency to fall asleep at odd times, she takes her metaphor from Alice in Wonderland: it is like falling down the rabbit hole. The same aspect allows an anecdote about her Cornwall-based sister – ‘the Mrs Malaprop of the Modern Age’ – who told her friends: ’Poor Sarah: now she is suffering from necrophilia.’

As well as educating those who may come into contact with Parkinsonians, the book has many tips for fellow-sufferers on how to cope with the progressive degeneration of their central nervous systems. One is never to let ambiguous remarks go unexplained. Expecting a delivery, Sarah answers the door to a friend, whose face falls to be greeted ‘Sorry, I thought you were a gas cooker!’ Another, perhaps surprisingly, is not to invest too much hope in press stories of breakthroughs that may produce an improved treatment, if not a cure, in five or so years’ time, but of which nothing further is heard.

A telling aspect of the book is how it has been appreciated by medical specialists. As Professor Andrew Lees of the (UK) National Hospital for Neurology comments in his foreword, ‘the art of medicine with its goals of accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment depends on listening to patients’ tales’. Sarah’s tale is informative but grounded in a common sense approach to a real problem, while being always lightened by a writer’s gift for illustrative comments and the remarkable ability, given the circumstances, to be effortlessly funny.

Published in paperback by Ferry House Books
144 page
ISBN-13:978-0-955011-0-8  £6.99