Free Most of Me by Robyn Michele Levy Page A

continues, “I have to tell you, for weeks I’ve been feeling really anxious about this operation, but not anymore. Last night I barely slept; I just kept thinking about your awful situation. Going over and over in my head what I’d do if I were you, forty-three years old, facing the future with a degenerative brain disease, raising a teenage daughter—these are such critical years when a girl needs her mother—and I did some research, found some good websites about Parkinson’s, and I have to tell you that some of these sites say early-onset Parkinson’s is more aggressive than the regular kind older people get. And the medication taken to deal with symptoms—it eventually stops working really well. So the big question is, do you wait until you really need the medicine, which could be years from now, and meanwhile continue slowing down? Or do you start taking the meds right away so that you can go back to being as normal as possible—for Naomi’s sake, at least until she graduates from high school? I don’t know, Robyn. It’s a tough call. You’ve got some hard choices to make. But it sure makes my situation seem easy.”
    Susan stops to take a breath, then dips her hand into her coat pocket. Feeling rattled and anxious, I fully expect her to whip out a spreadsheet charting the statistical potential outcomes of my bleak future, but it’s only a tissue to wipe her nose. Nothing to worry about.
    A few days later, early in the morning, Susan’s husband drives her to the hospital. I hear their car pull out from the lane and I wave bye-bye to her “boobs gone bad.” That’s what she called them: boobs gone bad. Like Thelma and Louise, driving off a cliff—the final escape. By the time lunch rolls around, Susan is in recovery, tripping on morphine, sporting a pair of synthetic tits. And Bergen and I are thinking of her while we drive down the hill, toward the ocean, on our way to visit the Answer Lady.
    Like many CBC fans, I first knew the Answer Lady as a feisty disembodied voice on Vicky Gabereau’s afternoon radio show. Inquisitive listeners would mail in their quirky questions, and the Answer Lady, whose real name is Marg Meikle, would conduct exhaustive research on the various subjects. Then she’d triumphantly appear on the show, telling Vicky what she’d learned. The on-air banter between the two women was always entertaining and sometimes piss-your-pants funny. She went on to publish several books, and then, when Vicky’s show ended, the Answer Lady fell off my radar.
    A few years later, when I began freelancing at CBC , I wound up meeting Marg. She was doing some research for the show I was assigned to and joined our morning story meeting. Although I’d never seen her before, I knew by the way she spoke and fidgeted in her chair that something was wrong with her. Later that day, I found out she had early-onset Parkinson’s. Back then, I didn’t know much about the disease, but I knew enough to feel sad for Marg’s misfortune. And I knew that Parkinson’s was one disease I never wanted to get.
    Since that day, I’ve learned to be careful what I don’t wish for. I’ve also learned that Marg and I have a lot in common: we’re both artists, writers, and radio broadcasters. We’re both married and raising one child. And we were both diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease at age forty-three. If anyone could shed some light on life with this affliction, the Answer Lady could. But would she? I called her home to find out and spoke with her husband, Noel, who invited Bergen and me to drop by for a cup of tea and a chat later that week. And so here we are, knocking on the door of their heritage house, being welcomed by a bushy-bearded Noel. He leads us to the living room, and out of the corner of my eye I spot safety railings on the walls and along the staircase, a cane leaning against a