Parkinson's Disease Early Onset 'Employment' transcript
Rhys: We're travel agents, and we used to concentrate purely on the domestic surfers paradise, and Jeanette ran the business on her own. And it then became so busy, nothing to do with Parkinson's, just purely the volume of work, where the two of us work together now.
Helen: I've worked in a variety of roles when I was initially diagnosed, and I was only doing voluntary work because I was so unwell. Then when I got onto the medication I was able to do some vocational teaching with adults in the morning which allowed me to rest in the evening. Then things were going quite well and I actually applied for a full time position and worked in that for about 18 months as a finance officer. Towards the end of that time as finance officer the job hadn't changed but I was changing and my ability to do the job was changing, largely because of depression, I was battling depression in the last months of that job and that was affecting my performance so I resigned.
Mary: We did sort of think about things that we wanted to do, one of the things managing a caravan park. So we went ahead and did that within about two years of me being diagnosed, but that was a mistake as it turned out, because even though I was coping well in my present surroundings taking the tablets, when I was taken out of my familiar job and my familiar surrounds and put into a whole new atmosphere of work and socialising it was quite stressful for me, that year was a very stressful year.
Jeanette: I do have a lot more problems with achieving the things in our business than I used to. I could look at file and ask ‘did I do this?' and you look through it again and again, and that takes time.
