Bench Strength — Page 2

There are worse places than Vancouver to have Parkinson’s. The Pacific Parkinson’s Research Centre at UBC has highly qualified nurse-advisors who answer their cellphones on Sunday afternoons. Susan Calne, my advisor through the first tough days, suggested I inform any group in which I take a physically active role that I had the disease. It made sense: the Flames are a hockey team, and I was having trouble skating. “If you don’t tell them,” she pointed out, “they’ll diagnose you themselves.”

Of course. Had they known all along? How could they not have, watching me get lost in my big jersey after spending an hour getting into my skates and pads? Mike Harling, a former bookstore owner who also has Parkinson’s, thinks it was the time it took him to dress, more than declining skills, that ended his hockey career.

Parkinson’s follows a different road in every case; it is impossible to predict how my symptoms will compare to those of, say, Michael J. Fox, or Muhammad Ali, or Ozzy Osbourne. They say about Parkinson’s that you don’t die of the disease, you die with it. Great, eh? What is predictable is that the condition will attack one side first. So far my case includes a pronounced tremor in my right arm and a tendency to trip over my right foot. I thought I was lucky: I write left-handed. But I play hockey right-handed, and I lost the ability to keep my goalie stick flat on the ice. Indeed, my right-side tremor became severe enough that my neurologist, Dr. Martin McKeown of the PPRC at UBC, considers my arm-shaking an exotic, highly charged variation.

Here’s how far along the rocky road I’ve travelled—or, as the Parkinson Society of B.C. would say, how far I’ve progressed on my personal journey. No neurologist has needed more than five minutes to confirm my diagnosis. You lose 75 percent of your brain’s dopamine production for symptoms to appear, and once those symptoms have led you to the neurologist’s door, there’s no chance of compensating for the loss of that much of the body’s nervous system regulator. It’s a tribute to the brain’s ingenuity that it seeks new routes for the dopamine it still does manufacture. There is a loss of cognition and particularly, in my case, as it turns out, a loss of short-term memory—which is maybe not such a bad thing if you’re a goalie who finds himself getting scored upon more often than you used to.

Each game night, the Flames split up into two teams, which makes sense when you consider that we have atomic physicists from UBC’s TRIUMF particle accelerator, who split atoms for a living, doing the choosing. We get consistently good-calibre hockey that way, and when we hunger for higher stakes we play two or three oldtimer tournaments a year.

Now, I should point out that the Vancouver Flames are a pretty good team—some of us played at UBC for Father David Bauer, who went on to found Canada’s National Team. Next time you see Fred Cadham, ask him what he learned about hockey from Terry Harper. At the summer Santa Rosa tournament in California, at which you can see ex-pros like Red Berenson and Harper in action, Cadham had the puck when he was assaulted by Harper, like Berenson a former Montreal Canadien. Harper slashed Cadham’s stick, rapped him on the back of his legs, rode him into the boards, and elbowed him high. As Cadham was contemplating what form of excruciating pain his revenge might take, Harper looked back and yelled, “Isn’t this fun?”

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