Exercise, positive attitude help runner, author fight Parkinson's

Copied from The Northwest Parkinson’s Foundation Weekly News Update

The Bellingham Herald - When Fred Ransdell's Parkinson's disease troubles him, when it makes him "unusually shaky" or tires him out, he goes for a jog or does chin-ups.

"I'm happy every morning I get up that I can get up,"

says Ransdell, who lives in east Richardson and who turns 68 on Wednesday.

 "When I think about what can go wrong, I go jogging and grind it out of my head."

He is a man who has made optimism his only option, a half-full glass the only one from which he allows himself to drink. His attitude allows him to somehow credit this disease, degenerating and potentially debilitating though it is, with giving him

"the best 10 years of my life."

Realizing that may sound somewhat odd, he clarifies:

"Having Parkinson's has made me do things I otherwise would have put off."

Having the progressive disease, which attacks the nervous system, spurred Ransdell on to spend more time in a passion previously only dreamed about: paleontology. Around the same time his illness was diagnosed, he started volunteering at the Dallas Museum of Nature & Science.

Until Parky (as he calls it in "Shaky Man Walking," his self-published autobiography) prevented him from doing so, Ransdell spent every Saturday for eight years cleaning fossils there. He also served as president of the Dallas Paleontological Society, and has hiked in the Grand Canyon four times.

"Once I got Parkinson's, I had the opportunity to do this stuff and I went hog wild with it,"

he says.

"I didn't know how much time I'd have to be healthy enough to do those things. So I started doing them and I'm grateful I did."

His earliest sign of having the disease came in 1996. He couldn't hold a video camera steadily enough to record the christening of his twin grandchildren. A year later while driving, he says, "my thumb kept jumping off the steering wheel." Six months later, Ransdell went to the doctor for what he thought was tennis elbow, and mentioned the "jumping thumb" symptom.

"He did a full physical on my arms and hands and said for now he'd call it a benign tremor," Ransdell says. "Then he looked at me, raised an eyebrow and said he may eventually have to diagnose it as Parkinson's. I knew what was coming. My sister and father had symptoms of it before they died of other things."

That doctor prescribed medication, and in 2001 sent Ransdell to a neurologist for the official Parkinson's diagnosis.

"The neurologist told me if I don't keep moving, my muscles will atrophy,"

Ransdell says.

"That fired me up. I can't imagine myself not being able to run. That alone drives me."

So do stories about others with Parkinson's. He read about an 82-year-old woman who can't walk, but can dance. And another person who can't walk, but who can ride a bike.

"Something about Parkinson's is fascinating," he says, "unless you have it."

Ransdell considers himself lucky. He only goes to the doctor once a year. His medication and acupuncture help him live a relatively normal lifestyle. On June 4 he'll go fossil-hunting with friends. He plans to travel to Germany to attend the wedding of an exchange student who lived with him and his wife, Rita.

Though he usually sees time as his ally, he writes in his book that "looking toward the future can also be a double-edged sword." Better treatments and even a cure could be a possibility, as could unforeseen obstacles.

"It can give me cause for fear," he writes, "but I've learned so much and come so far in appreciating my life thanks to Parky's constant meddling."