MIRACULOUS MOVES
For more than two years, Bianca Mollé dismissed the hand tremors she was experiencing. Being a type-A personality, she figured the shaking was just“nerves” or the result of too much caffeine from that second cup of coffee.
But the tremor intensified until it reached the point where the Marin County, CA, resident couldn’t eat soup without spilling it on herself. She soldiered on in her profession as a middle school teacher, becoming more and more easily fatigued with each passing day.
Eventually she went to the school librarian, whose husband had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s a year or two before. There was nobody in the staff room but the librarian and herself, and she held out her shaking hand. “Is this what your husband looks like?” she asked. The librarian said, “Yes.”
That was Bianca’s cue to see her general practitioner and then a neurologist, who gave her a series of physical tests, watching how she moved her fingers, how she wrote and how she walked, and ordered an MRI. He also told her he was 99.9 percent sure she had Parkinson’s.
He gave her a one-month prescription for the dopamine drug Sinemet; if she saw immediate improvement, they’d know it was Parkinson’s. “But because I was pretty young [59 at
