Pokie on a Soap Box

This time next week I will have map in hand and be ready to head out to Atlanta for the National Young Onset Parkinson Convention. I have become quite the traveling person lately. With new York City under my belt in April. Now I go to Atlanta for three days and then come home for a couple of weeks and then off again for California and Colorado and Wyoming. In September I'd like to be in Chicago for the Annual PD Therapeutics Conference . This leaves October to visit Cleveland and early November the east coast and Autumn with my very special friend Lady Hawk. There are many that believe that I have totally lost my mind and that is always a possibility. I'm not rich by any means when it comes to money yet when it comes to life I am a millionaire. I get a dream and save and plan until it happens and then go on to the next dream. The high I get on when I'm with friends is better than any medicine I could ever be on. I never hug one of my PD friends without crying. It's never planned but it happens and if we hug ten times we cry ten times. The oddest part is we never meet as strangers even though we have never met before in person. My children wait quietly in the background not understanding the force that forces me to do this crazy thing but you see the world has always taken Parkinson's Disease and pushed it and the people with it out of Society.....made us outcasts if you will. Laughed at our shakes and called us drunk when we stumbled and fell......my plan is not to let that happen any more. I have Parkinson's and I will be social and very much in the public be cause I want answers and I would like to have them now. If the government will not help find an answer through increased funding, then we must do it ourselves one on one. Cancer can do it so can Parkinson's Disease and through us MS and ALS will be stopped. The idea has always been stick us away in a nursing home and hope we die soon so as not to embarrass ourselves and others. That is not acceptable anymore. I'm sorry world . The baby boomer population would have not stood for this in the sixties and won't stand for it now. We have people 30 coming down with this disease. We send our youth to Irag to be maimed and then bring them home to come down with Parkinsons. Enough is enough for this mother and American citizen. I am waging my own war the only way I know how "One on One" I may not see a cure in my lifetime but it won't be because I didn't try......