DRUDGE REPORT FLASH 2001�
Michael Kinsley Discloses He Has Parkinson's Disease
Sun Dec 09 2001 14:02:13 ET
Eight years ago journalist Michael Kinsley was diagnosed with Parkinson's at
the age of 42, he writes in a TIME essay disclosing he has the disease.
"There are three ways to deal with news like this: acceptance, confrontation
or denial." Denial was Kinsley's choice.
He defines denial as "letting
the disease affect your life as little as possible. In fact...pretending as
best you can that you don't have it."
But "deceiving those around you is
more troublesome," Kinsley writes, "especially if you are a journalist,
whose whole professional value system is rapped up in the idea of truth:
demanding it of others, telling it yourself." Kinsley writes, "I've come to
the conclusion that most of the people I interact with every day actually do
know my secret and are pretending not to."
Now Parkinson's "is a hot
disease, thanks to celebrity sufferers like the Pope, Billy Graham, Janet
Reno, Muhammad Ali and Michael J. Fox. Even, they say, Yasser Arafat."
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