Colleen Friesen and her husband Kevin Redl live with their dog Baxter in Kimberley, BC. They enjoy traveling, but in the spring of 2024, on a walking trip in Spain, Colleen was unable to finish. Her legs would not cooperate.
By May of 2024, just before her 64th birthday, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD). She now adheres to a tight medication schedule, daily exercise, and meditation. She also believes that friendship and community are as necessary as a fitness regime.
A mixed-media artist, Colleen is very involved in the local arts scene, and, along with three other women living with Parkinson’s, recently started a Parkinson’s support group.
In a previous life, Colleen worked as a freelance travel writer but now writes exclusively on her blog at: www.colleenfriesen.com
The inspirational story below was shared for our April 2026 edition of Good News for World Parkinson’s Day (April 11). Please note: this article contains a small amount of mild swearing.
I have always thought of myself as a fairly empathetic person.
Knowing that empathy could be learned, and that empathy is also more common in readers, as books offer us a chance to view the world through someone else’s eyes, it seemed I was on top of it.
As a girl who grew up with a mother who often repeated the idea of ‘walking a mile in someone else’s shoes’ combined with the fact that I spent a lot of my childhood under the quilt with a flashlight and the latest Trixie Belden, and, as I still read a large amount of fiction albeit without the flashlight, I was pretty confident I had the empathy thing pretty much dialled in.
However.
Let me back this truck up.
In the last couple of weeks, my ‘off periods’ between pill doses was getting longer. This meant that in the hour or two prior to my next dose, I would find myself feeling more jittery, increasingly anxious and my usual feeling of being vaguely unwell would amplify into feeling pretty darned shitty.
Luckily my appointment with my neurologist was scheduled for this past Friday, exactly at the time when I was truly ‘off’. I was shaking, walking stiff and close to tears when I explained to him, that this is NOT who I am. I confessed too, that I’d been reluctant to tell him about these periods, because I was pretty sure he would recommend increasing my dosage.
He looked slightly bemused at my confession. And, as I suspected, he advised me to increase my meds from my current dosage of two pills three times a day (six pills total) to two pills four times a day (eight pills total).
I was very reluctant to implement this plan. In my mind, it meant owning the fact that more of my dopamine-producing neurons had died and that this was the beginning of the slide to more and more pills. I knew this was mostly inevitable but I was not willing to admit I was already at this point.
The real fear, of course, was that the more pills I take and the longer I take them, the more likely it is that I will end up with dyskinesia.
I suggested an alternative. What if I switched to 1 1/2 pills four times a day? It would still cap me at my current dose of six pills but there’d be less time between doses so perhaps that could minimize the off periods?
“You can certainly try that,” he said, “But remember, if it’s not working, please move up to the eight pills/day.”
I saw him Friday morning and by Friday afternoon I was snapping pills in half like a pro. This was bound to work, right??
Turns out the reason he had that dubious look, was that I, once again, was delusional.
Still, I persevered, but it was definitely getting harder to function. By Monday, when I dropped off our car to have the summer tires switched to the winter ones, I had slowed to a bit of a crawl. It was becoming increasingly painful to stand, never mind walk. Still, the car was going to take 90 minutes and it’s not far from the tire shop to the mall…I would simply do a few errands and come back. But as I shuffled toward the highway crosswalk, I wondered if I would have enough time to even make it.
I focused on moving as well as I could as I watched the crosswalk seconds tick down. Made it! Now I had to navigate the mall’s parking lot which suddenly looked ridiculously huge. I thought of all our amazing walking trips, like the one in Wales, clocking over 25 kms/day up hills and through the tail end of a hurricane.
And now here I was. This. This was now my life.
I made it into the mall and immediately sat down on the bench in the entrance: the very same bench where you often see old people.
Yes. THAT bench.
And it was here where I began thinking about empathy or maybe it’s not even so much empathy I’m talking about but more of a humbling realization of why people might be moving slowly.
From my bench I watched a woman struggle past me with her cane. A little later an old man, hunched over his walker, pushed and skidded his way along the tiles. It occurred to me, that they weren’t just slow and doddering. Maybe, like me, they were slow because they were in pain. Why had that so rarely occurred to me?
I sat with the burning muscle in my left leg, tried to ignore that my knees felt like broken glass, and that my ankles…well I swear an X-ray would have shown that they must have recently been broken.
I took a deep breath, a very humbling breath.
It seemed all I could manage was to get from one bench to the next and the biggest factor was the pain.
And this is the lesson that most of you probably already know but I feel compelled to share just in case you don’t…that is, my mother knew what she was talking about when she suggested walking in someone else’s shoes.
Sometimes we (in this case, I), really need to feel what it might be like to be that old person who is taking too long to make the right change or seems to be taking forever to move ahead in the line. It isn’t always just a matter of slowness, they might be going slow because every movement hurts.
I am now dutifully taking eight pills a day. The 56 pills that make up a week is an impressive pile. I have mixed emotions with every pill I ingest. First off, I’m grateful to live in Canada and have access to medicines and health care that can help me but I also can’t seem to shake the scary thought of how, with every pill, I’m increasing my chances of dyskinesia.
You would think that having this same infernal back-and-forth conversation with myself (four times every day!) would mean I could eventually resolve the issue and quit thinking about it. You would think that. And yet…well, clearly you have never been stuck in my looping brain.
Still, my failed experiment with the lower dose served a bigger purpose. First off, it has profoundly deepened my empathy for others who are struggling. This disease continues to humble me and blow out all my assumptions about who I am and how I move through the world.
It seems I’ve always needed to be hit over the head to really understand something. I’m not saying I ‘needed’ this disease to learn a lesson because, seriously, that is such a punitive and bullshit view of the world. Instead, it’s like a new friend with PD recently said to me, “We may as well do something positive with this shitty disease.”
And that is what I’m trying to do with this post and that’s what I’ve done with my new PD friends. We’ve started a Parkinson’s group and are building community through support.
The takeaway for me, is this: faced with a crappy situation, what’s the best thing you can do with it?
Do I get this right every day?
Seriously?! Have you met me?
Still. Am I continuing to try? Most definitely.
Here’s the thing…I was a fool as a teenager and rarely thought of consequences until I’d literally put my head through a windshield or two. I’m offering you the chance to go to school on me.
So, next time you feel yourself wanting to tap your foot in irritation at the ridiculously slow person ahead of you…I hope you remember my story.
Take a long and deep breath, gather up all your most empathetic responses, and remember one of my mom’s other favourite sayings, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
Now more than ever, our world needs empathy and kindness. Let it start with us.