“Is Parkinson’s Contagious?”

The apple of my eye is a 4 ft tall, 45 lbs creature with brown-green eyes and blonde hair, a very strong will and views of her own (I really can’t understand where she got those, I still have mine left…). Her name is Frida, she turned 7 last January and she’s my biggest fan as well as I’m hers. I dread the day she becomes a teenager, considering the clashes of wills that have already taken place while her loving father and my darling hubby tries to avoid ending up with permanent tinnitus from the loud noise. Frida is quick, both in body and mind, she loves to run and climb and she collects things whenever she gets a chance. If I hadn’t given birth to her myself, I’d think she was a squirrel… a  very large one… with no tail…From Frida’s point of view, I have always had Parkinson’s, it’s a natural part of her life, for good and bad. I have never tried to hide anything about it from her, she sees me take my medication and we talk openly about PD at home. No wonder that she has questions at times and wonders about this ”thing” that makes her mother so tired occasionally. One morning when she was about six years old, we were getting ourselves ready to go to daycare and work, respectively, and she suddenly asks me: ”Mummy, is Parkinson’s contagious?”. I stopped what I was doing and realised that today we might be a little bit late, because this was something we had to talk through. I realised that she must have heard about Parkinson’s disease and figured that most diseases are contagious, so could she get Parkinson’s from being around me??? We sat down and had a long talk about what PD is like, how they don’t really know why some people get it and other’s don’t and that clever people all around the world are trying to find a cure. It was one of those moment that I will remember for a very long time.

About six months later, Frida and me were on our way home from school and out of the blue she says: ”Mummy, I’m so glad you got Parkinson’s!”. I thought: ”f*****g hell, my daughter has completely lost her mind!”, but managed to transform it into a neutral enough: ”Oh, how do you figure that?” ”You see Mummy”, she said, ”if you hadn’t gotten Parkinson’s I wouldn’t be friends with Annika!”. Annika is one of my ”PD-buddies”, she turned 50 last year and she and Frida really like eachother. You can imagine how glad Annika was when I told her what darling Frida had said…

So, at the end of the day, Parkinson’s is not contagious but it can give you new dear friends to the whole family.