It's tough to look louche with advanced-stage Parkinson's, but somehow Fox manages it. Today, he is on target and walks into his Manhattan office buff, trim and wearing a blue cashmere sweater, like a well-preserved French exchange student. Fox once appeared unmedicated before Congress, to illustrate the terrible effects of the disease, and describes how he looked "as if an invisible bully were harassing me as I read my statement". If the medication is working but coincides with a natural surge of the neurotransmitter dopamine, he goes the other way and becomes "dyskinesic", sending him "rocking, dipping, diving". Visitors prepare for a range of possibilities: if the drugs haven't taken effect, he becomes "akinetic", seized by tremors and stiffness. Seventeen years after diagnosis, and it's still hard for him to predict exactly when his daily meds will kick in. "I hate the way it makes me look," he thought. makes me squirm and it makes my pants ride up so my socks are showing and my shoes fall off and I can't get the food up to my mouth when I want to." Fox had been a movie star for five years when he was diagnosed, and was used to being stared at. "Peculiar," he says, was the overall impression. A fter he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, but before he started writing books about optimism, Michael J Fox went through a period of seeing himself as he thought others saw him.
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