With three weeks to go before surrendering authority over my malfunctioning brain to the surgeons, the still-functioning bits find themselves mulling over the question as to who, or what, was responsible for getting me in this jam.
Surprisingly little is known about Parkinson's disease. The symptoms vary so considerably that diagnosis is notoriously difficult, and its root causes remain a mystery. Epidemiology offers little more than the confusing statistic that people who smoke and who drink coffee are less likely to get Parkinson's, but recourse to these substances has no remedial effect. There has been research which suggests there may be a genetic factor, and other findings point the finger at pesticides.
Pesticides - as a foreign correspondent, that was enough to fuel my imagination. The coincidence that my first symptom - cramped handwriting - appeared while I was covering the 1991 conflict in the Middle East offered a pointer to "Gulf War syndrome". The discovery that South African military intelligence had me under surveillance at a time when they were poisoning critics with organophosphates offered another line of speculation. Both seem to fall on the absence of any undue incidence of shuffling and shaking among my Gulf colleagues, or in the anti-apartheid community.
Almost as baffling as the fundamental causes of Parkinson's is the nature of its symptoms. In my case they are, primarily, shaking of my limbs and a stiffness of movement punctuated by freezing. The shaking is most noticeable, but it is a "resting tremor"; move to do something and the tremor will stop. The stiffness and freezing is more of a problem, from the morning battle to get out of bed, to the struggle I have getting through open doorways.
The trouble with doorways I tend to attribute to a subconscious reluctance to go through the birth process again, for fear of what awaits on the other side. The remark is offered only partly in jest, because I suspect that much of the mystery surrounding Parkinson's arises from the confused distinction between the physical and the psychological.
There is no suggestion that Parkinson's is so-called hypochondria. But one of the frustrations for researchers is the susceptibility of the disorder to the placebo effect. Give a Parkinson's patient a sugar pill and persuade them it is the proverbial "silver bullet" and by all accounts the results are likely to be miraculous, if temporary.
I haven't seen any research to support the assertion, but there does seem to be something almost mocking about the choice of victims and the symptoms visited upon them by neurological disorders. "Each man kills the thing he loves" wrote Wilde - a line I heard used recently in reference to the tragic irony of Alzheimer's hitting Iris Murdoch's mind. A handbook on Parkinson's I picked up shortly after my diagnosis was written by a doctor who had the shakes himself. A surgeon at a famous hospital, he was also an enthusiastic classical pianist.
I once had a talent I loved. It was commonplace compared to that of the surgeon, pianist, novelist and philosopher, but I used to be a fast touch-typist. Using a laptop, I found my typing accelerated to a point where it seemed I merely had to think the words to have them ripple across the screen.
As I contemplate my index finger, hesitantly pecking out these words on the keyboard, the thought comes: maybe we just fly too near the sun.
· David Beresford, a distinguished Guardian and Observer journalist, will undergo experimental brain surgery for his Parkinson's this September.
