At some point, either while I was packing for my December trip to California, or during my train ride there, or while I was there, I either misplaced or lost my passport. And it’s been driving me nuts this whole time, not even being able to remember if I actually Did pack it, or when it went missing during the trip. It’s like a black hole in my memory. If you’ve ever experienced anything like it you know how disturbing it is.

I’ve been mostly assuming it was stolen out of my luggage while traveling, but something that argues against that is it would have been in the same luggage pocket where I also had $200 in cash for miscellaneous trip expenses, and all that money, less what I spent, made it to California. I just can’t remember if the passport did or not, or was even in my luggage at that time. I remember unpacking when I got to my brother’s house, but I don’t remember if I saw or did anything with the passport. What I do remember is when I packed for my return home I looked for the passport, could not find it anywhere, and assumed I must have left it at home. But when I got back home I checked the safe for it and it wasn’t there.

I looked everywhere in the house for it after that, and began to panic when I could not find it, and worse, could not remember what I did with it while packing for the trip, or during the trip, or after the trip. I remembered taking it out of the safe while considering whether to take it with me because of all the ICE activity happening just then, and thinking I might need it for identification. But I kept drawing a complete blank as to whether or not I actually packed it along. It was maddening because I know I would have been careful about what I did with it it and yet I could remember nothing about what I did with it.

For weeks after returning from California, right up until last Wednesday while I was packing to go visit a friend in Sunbury Pennsylvania, I kept revisiting all the places in my house that I searched, hoping to find it in some nook or cranny I’d overlooked, or that it would just magically appear right before my eyes somewhere I’d looked before and hadn’t seen it. I checked every piece of luggage I own for the umpteenth time. I checked my briefcases. I checked all my backpacks, including the ones I plan to give away because I don’t use those anymore. I checked the other safes in the house. I checked my file cabinets. I checked every drawer in the house. Oh…and under the bed.

I asked my brother to double check my bedroom there in his house and he could not find it anywhere I suggested it might be. Which must mean it was stolen on the way out to California. But not the cash too? Nothing made sense, and I could remember nothing.

Since my Parkinson’s diagnosis, which I got finally some months after the December trip, I’ve been wondering if the Parkinson’s brain fog hasn’t played a part in all this.

So I felt that I had to tell the Feds that I’d either lost my passport, or it was stolen, and get a replacement. I didn’t want my passport being used for crime, so the Feds needed to know I didn’t have it.

Reporting it lost or stolen was easy-ish. I got online and filled out a form. But where it asked if it was stolen or lost I had to say I could not say. Maybe it was lost somewhere or maybe someone stole it while I was on the train, or while my luggage was in the luggage room in the first class lounge in Chicago. Those Amtrak bedrooms don’t lock on the outside, and anyone could have got in and rummaged though my luggage, which I hadn’t locked because I was carrying it with me. A mistake I won’t make again. The form asked when the passport was issued and I did not know because I only copied down its number not its issue or expiration date. Another mistake I won’t make again. I made an awkward guess as to the issue date.

I discovered I could not simply ask for a replacement passport, I had to apply for a new one. So I downloaded the application for a new passport form. I would need to submit it with a birth certificate. And so I came to another difficulty: I’d lost one of my birth certificates too. And once again it was a situation where I could not remember what happened to it, and looking everywhere in the house for it and not finding it.

I think the last time I had it in my hands was when I went to the Maryland DMV to get the Real ID thing on my driver’s license. I might have left it there. But I don’t know. I would have taken a folder of identification things with me, including the passport, and like when I applied for TSA Precheck the person behind the desk just glommed right onto my passport and ignored everything else. Which convinced me that a passport is the gold standard for ID.

Luckily I had two copies of my birth certificate. For some reason mom had ordered two copies and I inherited the second one after she passed away. But the second one, identical to the first one, did not have the notary seal on it, but on a separate California document stapled to it with the notary’s signature. I wasn’t sure that one would be accepted, but I went to the post office with it anyway and the application for a new passport I’d downloaded when I submitted the lost or stolen document.

The lady at the post office looked that other birth certificate over and didn’t throw it back at me so I felt a little relieved. She took another passport photo of me, bundled everything together and I paid the usual, not the expedited service fee, since I mostly wanted it for whenever I needed that gold standard ID, and maybe some possible trips outside the country when I retired a second time.

A couple days later I got an email saying my passport application was being processed and it might take six to eight weeks to arrive. I felt a wave of relief. It was short lived. About a week later I got a letter from the State Department telling me my application was put on hold and I needed to submit a birth certificate and, confusingly, the lost or stolen passport form that I’d submitted digitally on the website.

I found myself thinking the digital submission didn’t take for some reason. But the request for a birth certificate was more troubling. The one I submitted was identical to the one that got me my first passport, but it didn’t have the notary seal directly on it, but was stapled to it on an official document with the notary’s signature. I figured that was that sticking point.

So I looked up what the State Department regarded as a legitimate birth certificate and neither of mine looked anything like the sample on their website. They were both official documents from either the State of California or the hospital I was born at, a “Certificate of Live Birth” (that phrase always creeped me out a bit). But apparently they did not meet the standard. My mom’s birth certificate, which I have, looks exactly like the one on the State Department website: a very ornate thing like something you might frame and put on the wall next to your Employee of the Month Performance Award. (Here is my certificate of Live Birth, and here is my Five Years Without A Sick Day Service Award…) Until I looked it up I had no idea birth certificates were so…official looking. Mine looked something like a W-2.

I had a co-worker who was born at the same hospital I was (small world). He retired but I saw him one afternoon in the Institute cafeteria and asked him if he knew how hard it was to get another copy of a birth certificate from that hospital. He told me the hospital was closed some time ago. It was considered a California heritage site but the building had a fire that destroyed a lot of the interior. Our physical records he said, might have been lost.

I began to despair. I stalled for weeks about going to the California website and at least seeing what I might have to do to get a new copy of my birth certificate. I checked a few places. One thing I saw was if I had a passport that would make the process easy. Swell. I considered waiting until I could get out there with whatever documentation I had, Real ID driver’s license, past tax forms, mortgage statements, the old passport with holes in it, anything that might help, and throw myself on the mercy of the bureaucracy.

It was getting scary. In this day and age of Trump/ICE if I’m asked suddenly to prove I’m a citizen, how do I do it without either a passport or birth certificate? That fear was why I’d thought to take the passport with me to California last December in the first place.

This whole thing was severely stressing me out for weeks. Not just that the only ID I had now was my Real ID driver’s license, which I kept hearing was not good enough for Trump’s goons, but also that I could NOT remember what had happened to either my passport or that birth certificate that got me the first passport. And now I didn’t even have the other one because it had been sent to the State Department which it seemed didn’t like it.

Every time I began gnawing at it I would stress myself into a state of despair. It was the perfect storm of executive disfunction: having an array of paths to take, none of which I liked. All I did was stress every time I tried to think my way out of it.

So I just sat on it for weeks.

Last Wednesday I began packing for a trip to Sunbury Pennsylvania to visit a friend, Peterson Toscano, and maybe get my photographic eye opened again because Sunbury always gives my cameras something to love, and I desperately needed to feel that fire in me again after what Parkinson’s has been doing to my mind. While I packed, I took yet another opportunity to visit every place in the house I thought my passport might be. Again. And once again I could not find it. It was becoming a routine.

When I came back home yesterday I saw I’d received a priority mail envelope from U.S., Government Official Mail with a tracking bar code on it. As soon as I picked it up I could feel something like a passport inside of it. I bolted for the kitchen table and opened it up. There Was a passport inside of it.

I was so overjoyed you can’t imagine! All these weeks of stressing over it suddenly over. The wave of absolute relief practically swept me up off my feet. And then, more confusion.

My first thought was this was my lost passport and someone found it, sent it to the Feds and they’re sending it back to me. But no…checking it more carefully I could see it was a replacement, in fact it says on the first page that it is a replacement for a lost passport. It had been issued only a few days previously, and it arrived within the six to eight week timeframe they originally said a replacement would arrive in. But why then did I get that letter telling me my application was on hold until I got the correct documentation submitted?

I have no idea what was going on. None. Maybe my stalling over it for weeks had left it in someone’s inbox and a supervisor took another look at it and decided my old California birth certificate was good enough and yes I’d submitted the lost/stolen form digitally and that was good enough. Maybe my passport Had been stolen and some crook tried to use it and got caught and my passport confiscated and sent back to the State Department, which caused somebody to look and see if I’d reported it lost or stolen, and that broke the logjam on my application. I have no idea but I am So glad, So relieved, that I have a passport again and I’m not without that gold standard of identification anymore.

These days being without ID is risky. I keep thinking of this from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long by Robert Heinlein:

“When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere.”

Heinlein seems to have thought of himself as a “rational anarchist”. The older I get, the more I have to live in Donald Trump’s America, the more I find myself moving toward Heinlein. But I’m not there yet.

And this is the here and now, and my passport is Not leaving that safe again unless I am travelling with it or going somewhere to have some sort of ID background check done (like another Goddard badge, which isn’t likely now since I’m about to be retired again after Roman launches) and if that’s the case it is going in one of those around the neck passport wallets and Not Leaving My Body until I can get it back into the safe!

Hopefully they send me back the birth certificate I submitted my application with. But I am going to try and get another good one from California. Having the passport now might make it easier. If my original documentation didn’t go up in flames when my birth hospital burned.

I ordered a few books on the subject from Barnes & Noble and I had to laugh when I saw the “For Dummies” title in the list. But then I thought that one would give me an overview that would point me to topics to dig into further, and I ordered it anyway. In addition to these two I also ordered Navigating Life With Parkinson’s Disease (second edition) by Sotirios A. Parashos, MD. PhD and Rose L. Wichmann, PT.  They came yesterday.

Today starts my second week on the meds and I go to one pill three times a day. Last week was a half pill three times a day and those darn pills are a bit too crumbly. I have to be really careful when using the pill cutter on one or I’m taking a dose of pill dust. But for some reason the doctor needs me to ramp up to the correct dose over three weeks. It might be because a common side effect is nausea and they want my body to get accustomed to it gradually. I can say that so far I’ve experienced zero nausea. Which is good because that is the worst feeling ever. I’d rather have a toothache than nausea.

I’m hoping to see some improvement now since I really didn’t see any on the half pill dose. This morning wasn’t a good one when I first got up and took my morning coffee walk, but I’m feeling noticeably less unbalanced now. I have some work in the backyard I want to take care of so I’ll see how it goes.

Nobody is more self aware than the overthinker. I’m getting used to taking the measure of things as I’m getting ready for my day in the morning. How is the balance? The finger tremors? I do some practice quick turns to see how bad the unbalance is this morning. As I make my morning coffee I pay attention to how well my fingers are doing my bidding. Where once was a really irritating loss of focus and precision I had no explanation for, other than every doctor I talked to about it saying oh its just you’re getting old, now I have a reason for what’s happening. I have something to take a measure of. So how’s the Parkinson’s today?

I feel like I should be more angsty about it, but it’s not even close to debilitating just yet. It’s not great, but I can handle it at this stage. See my previous post about altered states of consciousness. I really want to be able to focus on some of the art projects I have in mind before it gets too much worse and the focus isn’t there. I’m really hoping the new meds give it at least some of that back for a while longer. I want to take more road trips while I’m still good to drive, but thank you all the idiots who voted for Trump, fuel prices are making that impossible, especially on a retirement income.

But the big factor as to why I’m not more upset about it is I’m in my 70s now and it’s not like I got this diagnosis in my twenties or thirties (that does happen), and the life I thought I had in front of me suddenly isn’t there anymore. I can look back on a lot of…interesting times…my only regret, and it’s a big one, is I had nobody to share it with heart and soul. But at least most of that is behind me now, not a lost life I could have had in front of me.

At this age your sort of expect it’s going to be Something. I just thought it would be the heart.

Some morning’s when I get up I’m a bit more out of balance, have a bit more hand tremors, then others. At least now I know why. Knowledge is grounding in its way, but the fact of it is still irritating. That said, I and my particular generation may have a slight advantage navigating Parkinson’s. At least some of us.

A friend told me once about how his elderly mom had been given an opiate for pain relief, and how the side effect of being all fuzzy headed was distressing her. He reassured her that it was okay, that happens, and it was all part of the treatment. Then he mentioned how since back in our younger days we’d all been getting high on all sorts of things, we’d become familiar with the feeling of being high, and navigating on foot while a bit wobbly. We had experience with altered states of consciousness, while his mom had not and it was all new to her and a bit frightening.

This may have played a part in why I hadn’t pushed more vigorously about getting a diagnosis. I could navigate the wobbliness because I’d done it often enough before. Coming on out of the blue like that it didn’t scare me so much as irritate me. And confuse me a bit as to what was going on. No, this isn’t just getting old. Something’s up. Maybe if it had sacred me I’d have pushed harder for a diagnosis.

It still irritates me, but at least I know what’s happening now.

I’ve already told those closest to me about this. Yesterday I talked it over with my project lead and his deputy at Space Telescope. Now I’m going to share it with the rest of you. Because at this age sharing our stories about aging is something we can all do for each other. Also, I’m an artist and wearing our hearts on our sleeves, and on the canvas, is just something we do.

For just over two years I’ve been struggling with our wonderful health care system trying to get a handle on what’s been happening to me. I’ve been getting forgetful, fuzzy headed, can’t focus. I’ve been losing balance, nearly falling over sometimes when I have to change course while walking through a crowd, or going back into the house because I keep inevitably forgetting to take something with me. I have tremors, mostly in the left hand thank goodness because it’s my right hand that’s the drawing hand. But that one’s getting them now too ever so slightly. I favor writing with one of my good fountain pens, usually my Mont Blanc 149 (the Diplomat), and lately I’ve had to be extra careful putting down some of the curvy letters of the alphabet while writing. Sometimes when I’m trying to draw I need to steady the pen with both hands. But I’ve also lost a lot of ability to focus and that’s kept me away from my drafting table and my cameras for going on a year now and that alone is killing me inside. For over two years I’ve been trying to get doctors to look at me and tell me what is happening and all I get is oh you’re just getting old take some vitamins. Okay, fine, I’m 72 now, so I reckon yes that’s old, but this didn’t feel like normal aging.

I ended up changing GPs (general practitioner) because my previous one retired and the new one they gave me at Whitman-Walker just didn’t take an interest. I looked for one at Union Memorial because they’ve done all the work on my heart since the heart attack in 2019 and I’ve never felt better cared for there. It’s an easy place for me to get to from home and I thought it would be good if I had all my doctors working from the same sets of data about me. The new GP I got took an instant interest in what was going on and she gave me several referrals.

First was for a brain scan. It showed nothing out of the ordinary for someone my age. Then there was one for a sleep study that I didn’t follow up on because I’d had a really bad experience with one at Hopkins about a decade and a half ago. Third one was for a neurologist. I had a session with him last Thursday, and finally got clarity.

The session was in thirds. First third was he asked me about what was going on with me and I gave him my laundry list of complaints. Pretty sure he was observing my body language and occasional difficulty getting words out. About halfway through he started asking me questions I wasn’t sure as to their relevance. How is my sense of smell? (it’s been nearly gone since the mid 1980s) When you wake up are your blankets all tangled up? Answer is somewhat, but not much unless I’m too hot and kicking them off.

Second third was your usual neurologist reflex/coordination tests. The little hammer on the knee, can you feel this vibrating here, does that feel cold there, follow my finger with your eyes, touch your nose. He had me walk back and forth in the hallway outside the examination room. I think by then he’d already figured out what was going on and he was trying to see how far along it had progressed.

Tests done we had a chat, which he began by saying to me “What I’m about to tell you isn’t good, but it’s not as bad as you might think.”

I have Parkinson’s.

And this might sound strange, even for me, and inappropriate, but my first reaction to that was an overwhelming sense of relief, because in that moment everything Just Clicked. Finally, after over two years of fighting with the American healthcare system to take my complaining seriously I had an explanation for what was happening to me that made sense. No it’s not good, but going for years and years and still not knowing could only let it keep getting worse and worse when I could have been taking the right meds and doing whatever I need to do to keep it at bay for as long as I can.

Neurologist says I have at least five, if not ten more years before I’ll be needing help. I’m going to make the most of this time, however long it turns out to be. I feel suddenly unchained from worrying so much about my future. I’ve never liked that live for the moment philosophy but now I can see some benefits there after all. I’ve been put on a medication that shovels dopamine into the brain and the neurologist said I should notice an immediate and significant improvement in mental clarity, balance and motor functions when I start taking it. I’ll reach a plateau of improvement that will slowly decline because there is no cure for this, only management. Fine. Whatever. I’ll manage.

I’m not going to troll for sympathy. I don’t even like playing the senior citizen card (just give me my discount). But you get to the ages I and my classmates are now and things just start dogpiling on us and one thing we can do for each other is tell our stories. I’ve been blogging my life ever since blogs first became a thing, and I reckon I’ll keep doing that. Also searching out others who’ve had this diagnosis and listening to their stories.

So now the rest of you know. I’m okay. I’ll deal with it and keep you posted.