Monday 2 March 2020
It is light now when I awake shortly after 6am. The walk to the station passes by daffodils and cherry blossom. The camellia in the garden is heavy with pink flowers. Sunday was bathed in lovely sunshine. It is now March rather than February and the four darkest, wettest and coldest months of the year are over. Springtime beckons.
Or does it?
Actually, I normally get pissed off at this time of the year. There are usually a couple of mild sunny days that lure you into the false belief that the winter has finally passed. And then, sure enough, it turns cold and wet again. Work is busy as everyone kicks off new projects, but there has been no day off since the New Year.
Likewise, my Parkinson’s recently lulled me into false hope by being pretty mild for a couple of weeks, only to get worse again this week. Hands shaking on the keyboard and voice muffled in an important client meeting today. Leg stiff and foot cramping on the way home. Constipated. Struggling to focus, in both senses of the word. Desperately tired all day.
It's a similar story with my aspiration to move into medical research in the next few years. I had an idea that, rather than volunteering, I might be able to quit my current job at the end of the 2020 and do lower paid, but still financially viable work for a charity or research group. Initially it sounded promising but then I met with a few different people over the past few weeks, including The Professor, and suddenly I was no longer optimistic about it all.
Whilst I have some useful skills and experience, it’s not so easy to transition from the corporate world. Charities typically run on tight budgets and won’t carve out a role tailored for me. Research teams prefer young, hungry, intellectually sharp people with PhDs, not fifty-year-olds who claim they were good twenty years ago, have Parkinson’s, and still expect a decent salary for working part time. In this endeavour, it seems I am back to plan A: struggle ever more in my current job with the PD millstone round my neck, for three or four more years (if I make it that far without getting fired or breaking down), until I can finally retire and volunteer. Except then my investments took a pounding this week as world markets tanked thanks to the Coronavirus.
I could pretend to be positive, but, as I wrote three years ago, sometimes there are just black hat days and this is one of them.
Right now, Spring is definitely not yet in the air.
