Shaky Ladies - Insider Information for Women with Parkinson's Disease

01/17/2026

Job Opportunity: Physical and Occupational Outpatient at Home Practice

🏘️ Healthy Aging Physical Therapy is a therapist-owned, therapist-run practice offering a refreshing alternative to traditional outpatient and home health models. We provide one-on-one, relationship-driven care to older adults in their homes — and we’re just as committed to creating a supportive, sustainable and family-friendly workplace for our clinicians.

📍 Service Area
We serve communities across the North Shore & Greater Boston, including Arlington, Belmont, Cambridge, Danvers, Lynnfield, Malden, Medford, Melrose, Middleton, North Reading, Peabody, Reading, Saugus, Somerville, Stoneham, Wakefield, Wi******er, and Woburn.
👉 Clinicians typically cover 2–4 towns close to home for efficiency and work-life balance.
Current high-need areas: Stoneham, Woburn, Wi******er, and Reading.

💚 What We Offer
~Flexible scheduling with a minimum of 12 visits/week
~Local territories based near your home
~Time and autonomy to deliver high-quality, patient-centered care
~Per Diem or Salaried positions
~Paid sick time, 401K with 3% match and profit-share bonus for all employees
~Full benefits including healthcare available for Salaried positions

🙋‍♀️ Who We’re Looking For
Licensed PTs or OTs in Massachusetts with:
~2–3 years experience (outpatient, home health, SNF, or acute)
~A passion for working with older adults and families
~Drive for ongoing learning and multidisciplinary collaboration
~Reliable transportation for in-home visits

👉 Apply Today
Send resumes to Katie@HealthyAgingPT.com or message me for more details!

01/16/2026

A note to a PD buddy:

I know you’ve been struggling with the full bandwidth of getting worse, maybe for the first time.

I’m not going through what you’re going through, but I feel like I can relate to how huge it is when the doo-doo is finally hitting the fan and you have to cope with new symptoms you have and existing symptoms that are either getting worse, leading to a lot of fears we had kept somewhat contained by confirming we are still in the game. Still working, still driving, still keeping up house and and home, body, hair, teeth and nail care, keeping essential daily need systems operational (having food. Keeping house/life/events/appointments on track). Repairs and maintenance of everything from cars to condo to shoes. There’s a whole layer keeping straight in your head everything going on with your PD, from recognizing changes, naming them, remembering them to explain to your doctor, and rehearsing in your head how to explain them to others; constantly trying to calculate cause and effect, running your own little research trial. And doing all this with an compromised tools (vision, perception, judgement, cognitive impairments in focus, attention, memory, sequencing past significant points in relationships, figuring out how you are going to take care of business in the short run, what you are going to do in the long run (that used to be a time so far away, it’s just hypothetical and theoretical.

You are in a world of presumptions that don’t apply to you. When you are single and live alone and have a limited amount of income/assets, Parkinson’s disease is A DIFFERENT DISEASE. Much more stress. Much higher risk. You have to rely on an unreliable body to take care of yourself and have to communicate and manage probably the most complex disease there is with an increasingly impaired thinker, while taking 24/7 an unpredictable number of different drugs, none of which are tested together, all of which are used experimentally, by each MDS, with no standard protocol and virtually no oversight. All of which cross into the brain and are every bit as mind altering, if not more so than the recreational drugs of addiction and abuse from alcohol to opiates, etc.

And we process this mentally by ourselves.

There are no answers that I know. Well I do know is that it’s important for me to have someone to just download this stuff too just to put it out there and sort it out. The times that I’ve had no one to do that with have been the worst.

*

12/03/2025

three weeks ago, I sat down on the piano and could play. Not great, but at least a little bit. It’s very weird. 

12/03/2025

Here’s a strange thing. Suddenly, I could play piano I’ve no idea why how weird is that?

10/05/2025

09/24/2025

My new digs. In Assisted Living at The Residence at Natick South

06/16/2025

Last spot!

Coach Dave and I are getting super excited for our FIRST EVER Fit and Fearless Foundations session, starting July 8th, 2025! We've got ONE spot left in our July session - who wants it???..
Fit and Fearless is:
✅ Adaptive Martial Arts designed to improve your strength, balance and reaction time
✅ Designed to teach you the skills you need to fall safely and reduce your risk of injury
✅ For older adults and people with Parkinson's Disease - no marital arts experience needed!
✅ Co-taught by Muay Thai Coach Dave Lyons and Dr. Katie Wadland, PT, DPT, GCS
✅ Going to be super fun, super amazing and super effective all at the same time. ..
Learn more and sign up here: https://healthyagingpt.com/fit-and-fearless ..
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
🏡 HAPT IS AT-HOME PHYSICAL & OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY + COMMUNITY FITNESS:
🌟 Balance and Fall Prevention
🌟 Orthopedic Pain and Injuries
🌟 Parkinson's Disease Specialty Program
🌟 Vestibular Rehabilitation for Dizziness
🌟 Osteoporosis Consultations & Management
🌟 Private Physical and Occupational Therapy
🌟 Personal Training + Health Coaching
🌟 Strength + Balance Classes at Local Senior Centers
🌟 Virtual Fitness Classes through the OsteoCLUB
🌍 Care available in Arlington, Belmont, Danvers, Lynnfield, Malden, Medford, Melrose, Middleton, North Reading, Peabody, Reading, Saugus, Stoneham, Wakefield, Wi******er, and Woburn, Massachusetts
📞 Call (617) 398-4508 or visit us on the web to schedule your evaluation today!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Defensive Edge Martial Arts Center, Wakefield MA

06/07/2025

Version three

V3. A Manifesto for Movement Disorder Specialists

What You Can’t Learn in Medical School
1. Not all movement is therapeutic.
A patient forcing herself to lift weights through searing back pain is not “fighting Parkinson’s.” She’s surviving it, sometimes in silence, because she’s afraid to look like she’s giving up.
2. We are not all wired the same.
Some of us don’t thrive on reps and sets. Some of us thrive on rearranging the pantry, hauling a suitcase, or playing tag with a grandchild. That counts as movement too.
3. Pain is not weakness. It is information.
If a patient says, “I feel better when I stop exercising,” that’s not defiance. It’s data. Listen to it.
4. You cannot measure our success by our compliance.
The gold standard should not be whether we followed the protocol. It should be whether we feel better in our own skin.
5. Sometimes we need permission to quit.
Not to quit living. To quit hurting ourselves in the name of staying “on track.” Especially if the track we’re on is paved with guilt.
6. Movement should feel like freedom, not punishment.
If your recommendation feels like a burden—if it adds pain instead of easing it—consider the possibility that it may not be right for this body at this stage in this life.
7. The most powerful exercise I do now is saying no.
No to what hurts. No to what’s prescribed without nuance. No to pain in disguise as progress.

⸻

If you want to help me—and others like me—don’t just ask how many minutes I’ve exercised this week. Ask if I feel better afterward. Ask if it brings me joy. Ask if I dread it.

And if I tell you I feel best when my trainer is on vacation… believe me.

06/07/2025

Version two

V2 Chapter: When Exercise Hurts

It’s probably heresy to say this out loud, but here goes:

I feel my best when my trainer is on vacation.

There. I said it.

Let me back up. I’ve been a lifelong mover. Not an athlete—not even close. I’ve never played team sports. I couldn’t hula hoop. I broke a leg the second time I tried skiing. I have no moves. But I’ve always needed to move. Not competitively, not for show, just… to feel right.

Walking, mostly. Hiking, swimming, treadmills. Through most of my adult life, exercise has been the way I stayed afloat, mentally and physically. It wasn’t about a six-pack or a race time. It was how I processed the world, how I slept, how I coped.

So naturally, when I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I doubled down.

The message from the experts was loud and unanimous:

“Exercise, exercise, exercise.”
“It’s the only thing we know slows progression.”
“Use it or lose it.”

I took that advice to heart. I went to the gym. I hired a trainer. I showed up—twice a week, every week. I lifted weights. I lunged. I twisted and torqued and tried to do the moves even when my body said no. And through it all, I was in pain.

Specifically, back pain. Sometimes shoulder pain. Sometimes just pain-pain, the kind that wears you down and makes you wonder how much of this is helping versus how much is just habit.

I blamed myself, of course. I figured I wasn’t doing it right. Maybe I was too stiff, too weak, too slow. Parkinson’s is a master of blame. It makes you second-guess everything.

But then something interesting happened. My trainer went on vacation.

And I started to feel… better.

The back pain began to ease. I was still moving plenty. I didn’t sit around. I didn’t “give up.” I rearranged furniture. I climbed up to top shelves. I took long walks. I hauled bags. I stayed on my feet almost all day. But I stopped doing the exercises that had been handed to me—the ones that required me to contort, twist, and lift in unnatural ways.

And my body, for the first time in months, stopped screaming.

That moment was like a door unlocking.

I wrote down what made me feel good—truly good, not just what I was told should feel good. The list surprised me:
• I feel best when I’m with my grandchildren.
• I feel best when I’m with people I know.
• I feel best when my trainer is on vacation.

There it was. In my own handwriting. My body had been telling me for a long time, but I hadn’t listened:
Sometimes, “doing the right thing” doesn’t feel right at all.

And now I’m ready to say this even louder:

06/07/2025

CHAT GPT wrote with me three versions of this same issue. It’s not half bad! Version one

Chapter Working Out My Truth
(a draft reflection based on your message)

I’ve been a lifelong mover—not a natural athlete, not a team-sport type, but someone who always had to keep moving. For decades, I walked. I joined gyms. I sweated it out. After Parkinson’s came into the picture, I doubled down—two sessions a week with a trainer, plus independent workouts. I was what you’d call a gym rat.

And I was always in pain.

I blamed my twisting torso, the rigidity of Parkinson’s, the unpredictability of my gait. But recently, something shifted—not in my spine, but in my thinking.

I wrote down what makes me feel better, truly better. And there it was, in plain language:
• I feel best with my grandchildren.
• I feel best with people I know.
• I feel best… when my trainer is on vacation.

At first, it made me laugh. Then it made me pause.

Because I wasn’t just joking. I realized something big:
All that exercise I was doing—the kind everyone says is essential for Parkinson’s—was actually making me feel worse.

It wasn’t that I was inactive. I still don’t sit still. I walk. I climb. I rearrange furniture. I lift heavy things off high shelves and move them across the room if they don’t look quite right. My life is movement.

But formal exercise—especially with weights—was causing me pain. Chronic back pain. Fatigue. A feeling of misalignment, like I was asking my body to move in ways it no longer wanted to.

Since stepping away from those workouts, I feel so much better. My pain has lessened. I haven’t turned into a couch potato—I’m still always in motion—but it’s my motion. It’s natural, and it works with my body instead of against it.

Maybe I was trying to “fix” something that didn’t want to be fixed that way. Maybe my body was asking me to listen, not to push.

⸻

05/18/2025

this is what I have discovered for myself, as a patient. It may apply to some of what you are experiencing or seeing in your loved ones.

1. Depression and anxiety, maybe one of the same. Irregardless they are both treated the same way.

2. There are different kinds of depression and Parkinson’s depression is not the same as depression in the general population.

3. Different kinds of depression are treated differently, but you can have more than one kind of depression.

Again, when I use the word depression, I am referring to both depression and anxiety.

4. Depression is not a lack of gratitude. Nor is it a reaction to the diagnosis. Grief is a reaction to the diagnosis. Depression is a result of alterations in certain neural transmitters.

5. Ignore the research. Really messed up conclusions.

6. Every single person I know with Parkinson’s has depression/anxiety.

7. Lorazepam is designed to be short acting. Antidepressants like the one that I take, citalopram, are antidepressants and anti anxiety agents designed to be taken for long periods of time. They don’t make me sleepy.

8. Taking Celexa has improved my cognition. Reduced my brain fog. Helps many non-motor symptoms. My Parkinson’s meds are nowhere near as effective as they are when taken with the depressant.

There is no blame, shame, or failure to cope with the disease when talking about depression, anxiety. It is simply due to the same chemistry that causes tremors, etc.

There’s no one in any of my support groups who is not on an antidepressant.

Most of us experience, anxiety in a bad way as our medications are wearing off. Many of us experience, revved up, kind of keyed up anxiety when our medicines are peak dose

Depression and anxiety that is caused by the fluctuations of our medication is not helped by antidepressants. It is helped by a regulation and of our medication. By regulation, I mean, experimenting with dosages and spacing of time.

Constipation and protein interfere with the absorption of the drug and you get better at it overtime, but there’s no way to make us plans that everything goes perfectly right all the time. Every day every dosage is an adjustment.

There are a lot of different ways to take the medicine.

For example, I thought that there was a maximum number of don’t believe a dopa. I could take it one time.

I’ve experimented with that with the cooperation and supervision of my doctor and in fact what I believe for the last 20 years actually is not relevant anymore.

The bottom line as you constantly have to be adjusting and thinking about medications and when you take them and what they’re doing and it’s not a quick and easy answer, but I can tell you for sure that and if you are seeing your loved ones having panic and anxiety attacks , that it is due to the levels of medication in their syste

I can tell you that the short act again depressants are not the answer for my experience

and that ideally you should wait at least four weeks to make between making any changes in medication‘s. Make one change at a time and track it carefully. It takes at least a month for your brain to adjust to change your medication. You will know when your brain is adjusted when you start having a predictable response to the medication. You won’t know if you’re having unpredictable response unless you are keeping careful log.

you really don’t need to keep a log of each symptom and what’s happening. It’s useful just to keep a log of when you’re on and off. And maybe when you eat protein, but you don’t need to put in every symptom and when it starts and stops.

Hope this helps

05/17/2025

I have done nothing today other than play with AI. I asked AI to make a parody of the Dwight Yoakam song, “fast as You“ using the title “slow as me“ and basing it on the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

Between ChatGPT and Suno: here’s what I got! Now I’m going to eat breakfast!

Listen and make your own on Suno.