When, at the age of 27, I walked into the waiting room of a Neurology Department of a west London hospital, I wondered what on earth I had in common with the other people in that room. Some of them shook, some of them seemed to be frozen like statues and others moved around wildly; their limbs seemingly in a state of perpetual convulsion. All of them were a good forty years my senior. Half an hour later having been diagnosed with Parkinson's, it was as if someone had pushed the fast forward button on my life and walking back through the waiting room I realized that I now had an affinity with the people in that room. I had become one of them. Thirty minutes had become forty years.

doi : 10.5214/ans.0972.7531.2009.160402