By Jacqueline Elmore
If you were an adolescent in 1985, when sci-fi comedy Back to the Future was first released, you might have heard of its leading star, Michael J. Fox. For a long time, his boyish charm was the object of my teenage affection.
The skateboard, that red body warmer, those Calvin Klein underpants and the fact that he was 24, playing a 17-year-old who was sent back to 1955 in a timetravelling Delorean. I didn’t care. He was it for me.
By 1991, I had pretty much seen all of his movies and was still in hot pursuit of those that followed. Yet it was in this year, at the age of just 29, that Michael was first diagnosed with early on-set Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects part of the brain which leads to a reduction in dopamine (a chemical that plays a key role in movement and coordination) - a condition I knew nothing about.
““... I came home and did what everyone tells you not to do, I went onto Google and searched ‘writing getting smaller’ and the words Parkinson’s disease flashed up straightaway.””
In 1998, almost twenty five years ago, he finally disclosed his news to the world and subsequently made it his life goal to commit himself to Parkinson’s research; a subject I still knew very little about.
That is until I got the chance to speak to Nicky Leask.
Nicky is a long-standing and much loved resident of Cuckfield, who, at 48, was also diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s disease.
“It’s really hard to pinpoint the moment when my symptoms started to occur. A lot of people still don’t know what Parkinson’s is and for many that have it, they can live for years not knowing they have it or before getting a final diagnosis.”
Excerpt from March 2022’s issue of Cuckfield Life
