My stepfather wrecked the riding lawnmower Friday taking it down a mountain road that was way too steep for it. The brakes gave out and it ended up flipping--thankfully he went a different direction than it did. But he's all bruised up with some cracked ribs. May have torn his shoulder; they're still not sure if it's just very sore or worse.
But this has been one in a long line of accidents that he's suffered lately. This one was just really, really bad judgment on his part (this road has like a 14% incline; it's crazy), but a couple of weeks ago he fell off scaffolding in a room he was remodeling in their house. A couple of months before that he caught the leg of his overalls on fire and didn't notice it. He came in the house and my mother was horrified by his pants leg and they got him undressed and he had second and third degree burns down his shin.
I asked my mother then, how can anyone not know their leg is on fire? He has type 2 diabetes, but hasn't previously exhibited any sort of numbness in his legs or problems with his skin or feet or any of the problems you see in "bad" diabetics. He's on oral medicine to treat it. I don't know if his burn ever hurt him.
He's had other cases of stumbling or falling that didn't result in him getting hurt, but this last go-round of accidents put me in mind of Parkinson's. I had a co-worker who was diagnosed with it after she fell twice in the span of one year, breaking the same wrist both times. So I knew that falling, not just tremors, was a sign. Lamarr's mother had Parkinson's, with noticeable tremors. She was well into it and had Alzehimers to boot when we took her in to live with us, so I never saw early symptoms.
My stepfather is also having memory and rational problems. They got him checked for Alzehimer's, but his CT scan was sort of inconclusive. He had some brain-tissue loss, but they wouldn't say there was enough there to warrant an Alzehimer's diagnosis. He'll be 67 in August, so a bit is expected for his age anyways.
I saw numbness and tingling listed as secondary side effects. Does anyone know of someone with Parkinson's being so numb they didn't know they were injuring themselves (i.e. the fire)? Or is that related to an inability or slowness to react to a painful stimulant? I sent my mother a list of symptoms because I haven't seen him enough in a while to know if he's stooped, not blinking or not swinging his arms when he walks. He has had a problematic shoulder for quite some time and he has some sort of pain that causes him to sleep in his recliner more often than not. I think that he goes to bed and lays in one position and doesn't roll over; then he wakes up hurting, especially in either shoulder. He has had stiffness and pain in his hands for a number of years now, which was attributed to arthritis. He used to be a nuclear medicine technician and we always suspected his handling radioactive materials every day for years might have had something to do with that, because that did seem to come on early--in his 40's. But I wonder if that's linked to the other stiffness and pain he's having other places now?