WordSmith: ‘I won’t be beaten by buttons!’
Every Saturday morning he shuffled past the window of our flat in Manchester. I’d watch him from behind net curtains, unseen. He was exceptionally tall and he walked with short steps, his long arms held rigidly at his sides. He’d stop frequently and lurch forward, causing me to reach for the window latch, ready to jump out and catch him before he fell face-first onto the concrete pavement. But he always recovered and continued shuffling onwards.
One Saturday morning when Mam had a rare day off, I shouted to her in the kitchen, “Mam, come here, see if you know the man I was telling you about.”
Mam came into the living room and we watched him together. After a moment, she said, “That’s the man from Cass Street. He has Parkinson’s Disease.”
Disease? He didn’t look like he had a disease. For me, there was only one disease and it terrified me: Rabies. At the time, the UK was running a series of public information advertisements highlighting the dangers of smuggling animals from abroad. They showed a young black lad of my age, frothing at the mouth and dying an agonising death with the final line reading: RABIES MEANS DEATH.
For me, disease meant screaming towards a painful end, not shuffling past my window with a quiet dignity. I thought the shuffling man was the only person in the world with Parkinson’s disease. And I suppose, in my nine-year-old world, he was.
Many years later, Parkinson’s would enter my life again, this time through someone I loved dearly: Dad. My aunt was the first to notice the slight shake in his hand. “You’ve Parkinson’s disease, Sean,” she told him. Dad rolled his eyes, shook his head and dismissed her diagnosis. Shortly afterwards, his doctor confirmed it.
So while Parkinson’s shuffled into my personal life through Dad, it sprinted into my professional life through work. The advertising agency I worked for had been tasked with creating a global campaign to promote a new drug developed to simplify the often-complicated treatment regimens faced by people living with Parkinson’s disease.
And while Dad seemed little bothered by his personal Parkinson’s journey, I was well and truly bothered by my professional one.
Who was I to influence healthcare professionals to prescribe a drug for Parkinson’s disease? I was an art school graduate, a long way removed from the world of medicine. Soon, Parkinson’s disease consumed my world. In the pharmaceutical industry, time is money. A new drug represents years of research, enormous investment and, once it reaches the market, a limited period of patented protection before generic competition arrives. The pressure to make the most of that window is considerable. There was no time for arty-preciousness. It was all: go, go, go!
And there I was, a creative person with an artistic temperament and, I hoped, an empathetic outlook, working in an industry driven by commercial targets and deadlines. It was a strange collision of worlds: professionally promoting a drug while personally watching my father live with the very disease it was developed to treat.
In the midst of developing the creative campaign, I returned to Cavan for a wedding. Dad and I were running late. Going to see if he was nearly ready, I stopped, stepped back and watched him. A man whose hands had built hundreds upon hundreds of houses was struggling to fasten his buttons. Shamefully, I made an insensitive mistake. I walked in and said, “Dad, let me button them…”
Dad rarely lost his temper, but he did that morning. He told me, in very colourful language, that he wouldn’t be beaten by buttons.
Recently while attending an event, a friend came up to me, “Gerard, have a look at this.” It was a jacket.
When I tried it on my life seemed to come full circle: from the shuffling man, through my career in pharmaceutical advertising, to Dad struggling with buttons. You see, this jacket was ingenious. It had magnetic fastenings that practically fastened themselves. MagneFX is the brainchild of Cavan based Chris and Marlena. Like many great ideas, it was born of personal experience: seeing a little boy struggle with buttons and zips in his everyday life, and wanting to make that life a little easier.
It made me think about Dad. I’d spent my professional life promoting a drug for Parkinson’s disease, yet here was a jacket to remind me that improving quality of life doesn’t always come in a drug.
For people living with movement disorders, a simple fastening system can mean dignity, independence and so much more. Dad would have approved of that.
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