Michael J. Fox opened up about the serious health problems he continues to face, almost 30 years after he first learned he has Parkinson’s Disease.
In a new interview with The New York Times Magazine, the beloved actor opened up about a “recurring problem” he has with his spinal cord.
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“I was told it was benign but if it stayed static I would have diminished feeling in my legs and difficulty moving,” the Back to the Future star explained. “Then all of a sudden I started falling — a lot. It was getting ridiculous. I was trying to parse what was the Parkinson’s and what was the spinal thing. But it came to the point where it was probably necessary to have surgery. So I had surgery, and an intense amount of physical therapy after. I did it all, and eventually people asked me to do some acting.”
Fox said he was going to go back to work in August, but fractured his arm in a fall. “I ended up getting 19 pins and a plate. It was such a blow,” he said.
When asked how he dealt with the situation, Fox said he tries to avoid being philosophical or “New Age-y.” Instead, he believed he was pushing himself too far after serious surgery.
“It’s because I had certain optimistic expectations of myself, and I’d had results to bear out those expectations, but I’d had failures too. And I hadn’t given the failures equal weight,” the Family Ties star said.
Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1991, but did not go public with the diagnosis until 1998. He later launched The Michael J. Fox Foundation and has become the public face of the disease, raising millions to fight it. When he started the foundation, he said he hoped to find a cure within 10 years, but it has been almost 20 years since the foundation launched. Fox is still confident a cure will be found someday.
“There’s a new drug that’s been approved that’s like a rescue inhaler for when you freeze. Because freezing is a very real thing for Parkinson’s patients,” Fox explained to the Times. “I could be sitting here with my foot on fire and a glass of water over there on the table and all I’d be able to do is think about how good it would feel to pour that water on my foot. Treatments for that can make a huge difference in people’s lives. Now, if we can prophylactically keep Parkinson’s symptoms from developing in a person, is that a cure? No. Would I take it? Yes.”
Fox does not believe he will get much help from President Donald Trump’s administration, even though the foundation does have a working relationship with the government.
“Trump is not sitting around thinking about Parkinson’s. But one thing that angered me is when he mocked that reporter. That was a stab to the guts,” Fox said, referring to the 2015 rally where Trump mocked a journalist with the joint condition arthrogryposis. “Not just for me, but for people I know and work with, who try so hard to overcome other people’s atavistic aversion to anybody that moves differently. So I thought, Do I say something in response? Then I thought, People already know Trump is an [expletive].”
Fox, a five-time Emmy winner, is now working on a fourth book. He has already written three memoirs, including 2010’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future: Twists and Turns and Lessons Learned.
Photo credit: ABC/Ida Mae Astute
