We probably should have taken him seriously, but I think even he was joking. Papa’s handwriting has gotten more and more compressed over the last couple of years, becoming almost impossible to read.
“It’s probably a symptom of something,” he laughed. We laughed, too, because Papa likes to joke about growing old. We took it as a joke; he meant it was a joke. It wasn’t a joke — or it shouldn’t have been.
What would Papa have to write about now? Perhaps a description of the spider he was sure he saw in the corner of the room the other night. He called me in to take care of it.
“There, in the corner,” he said, pointing.
“What?”
“A spider.”
I looked closely — no spider. “It must have just been a shadow,” I said.
What is hallucinating spiders a symptom of? If you’d asked me before this afternoon, I would have suggested it was a symptom of listening to the Cure too much:
On candy stripe legs the Spiderman comes
Softly through the shadow of the evening sun
Stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead
Looking for the victim shivering in bed
Searching out fear in the gathering gloom and
Suddenly
A movement in the corner of the room
And there is nothing I can do
When I realize with fright
That the Spiderman is having me for dinner tonight
I listened to that song in high school more times than I care to mention — a favorite from a favorite album of 1989.
But that’s not what it was. Nothing so innocent.
Today, Papa went for a consultation with a neurologist. The unperceived symptoms combined with other issues (blood pressure jumps, moments of temporary near-paralysis as if someone hit a pause button, slight loss of balance, some tremors in the hands, memory issues — issues that have appeared in the last few weeks and sent us to the doctor for an answer) to give the doctor a diagnosis which, in his words, has a 95% probability of being accurate: Parkinson’s.
There is one other option, but we’re hoping for Parkinson’s, because option two has no treatment possibility at all. What an odd response: we’re crossing our fingers for Parkinson’s because Levodopa can make it manageable. The other possibility — well, I don’t even want to think about it. Luckily, the neurologist said most of the symptoms are more indicative of Parkinson’s. Especially the spiders. “The most common hallucination Parkinson’s patients have involve spiders,” he explained. Who knew? (Answer: a neurologist.)
Fortunately, we have caught it relatively early, and medications should be able to manage the symptoms and perhaps even slow things. Or not — PD is a different disease for every patient.
Papa is relieved to have a diagnosis. We all are. It’s no longer a mystery: these moments of paused movements, the balance difficulties, the memory issues are less depressing when they have a name and a treatment plan. We had a heartfelt “it could be worse” talk in the evening. It could be something truly devastating like Alzheimer’s (though I never feared it was). It could have all reached this point when Nana was still around, which would have absolutely broken her heart, filled her with guilt (“Why didn’t I see those things as symptoms?”), and wreaked her with anxiety and worry.
Not forever, though — when Papa was admitted for a surgery on his lung that ended up taking 2 lobes and leaving him in ICU for a week, she cried a lot at first but then went into full Nana mode and became a lioness protecting Papa, keeping track of treatments, medicines, shaving, and making sure the nurses were running a tight ship. That’s what Nana did: process her anxiety with tears and then become a fearless protector.
That’s our job now. I don’t know that we could do it as well as Nana, but we’ll do our best.