June 27, 2016
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Harry McMurtry often walked 15 miles a day over several weeks to complete his journey from NYC to Toronto.
Outside of Utica, NY, the temperature hovered in the high-humidity 90s, the stink of cow manure rose from surrounding farmland, and Harry McMurtry, a 54-year-old Upper West Sider with early-onset Parkinson’s disease, still had nearly 300 miles to walk.
Every muscle in his body ached, and his calves began seizing up.
It’d be easy to quit, but McMurtry knew he couldn’t give up. His challenge, a walk from The Bronx to Toronto, dubbed 500 Miles for Parkinson’s, began on May 7 and concluded last week, raising $500,000 for research and awareness — and drawing well-wishers and fellow walkers along the way.
“What kept me going was everyone saying how inspiring the walk was for them,” McMurtry tells The Post. “Along the route, people with Parkinson’s drove in to see us. There were a lot of hugs. The message is that you need to get out there and keep moving.”
It’s important to move, he says, because growing evidence shows that exercise can slow the progression of the neurodegenerative brain disorder. “People without the disease say that you should listen to your body,” McMurtry says. “But as [one Parkinson’s sufferer] told a therapist, ‘If I listen to my body, I will never move.’ The big thing in Parkinson’s is exercise.”
McMurtry began learning that in January 2005, when the then-42-year-old attorney was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease, a rare ailment afflicting around 500,000 people under the age of 50 worldwide. Though the disease itself is not fatal, it creates long-term disability as sufferers progressively lose motor function.
McMurtry’s first symptom was arm rigidity. Medical tests showed it to be more than mere stiffness. “Before the diagnosis, I kind of believed that I had Parkinson’s,” says McMurtry. Even so, he decided not to let it get him down. “I kept working, tried to live a normal life, and chose not to dwell on the disease,” he adds. “I stayed busy and didn’t tell most people for at least two years.”
Six years after the diagnosis, visible symptoms that included fatigue and difficulty communicating forced him to retire early. Today, he suffers from shaking extremities, dragging gait and slurred speech. “People have stopped me to ask if I need an ambulance,” he says. “Police in Central Park once thought I was drunk.”
He came up with the idea for his marathon jaunt — which involved walking as many as 15 miles per day, contending with debilitating blisters, and bouncing back from a fall that left him temporarily disoriented and in the emergency room — in October 2014. “I was strolling in Central Park with a friend, discussing ideas for fund-raising, when I mentioned that my walking had dramatically improved since undergoing brain-stimulation surgery in 2011,” says McMurtry, referring to the procedure that uses electrical brain impulses to alleviate symptoms. “I decided that I could do a walk to showcase that I am living well.”
Aided by his wife of three years, Deborah Bradley (they met at a blackjack table in Las Vegas five years after his diagnosis; McMurtry proposed on the eve of his brain surgery), he spent a year and a half training for the walk, organizing a 100-person volunteer crew and promoting it on the Internet. That resulted in two others afflicted with Parkinson’s — Sue Thompson, 50, and Dr. Ross Sugar, 56 — joining him in The Bronx. Thompson completed the entire walk; Sugar was there for most of it.
The trio generated big responses from people along the way. McMurtry recalls one woman emptying her purse and contributing $200. Others handed over $100 bills. A truck driver gave them bags of carrots. “The greatest thing,” he says, “was people who didn’t have a lot of money contributing what they had.”
As McMurtry neared Toronto (where he lived before moving to New York), a school bus full of former high-school classmates greeted him. His old law firm shut down for the day, and employees from it joined in on the final leg. “We had a police escort and 300 or so people walking with us,” says McMurtry, adding that a celebration and charity auction in Toronto raised $250,000. “My brother carried a banner, and the mayor of Toronto met us.”
Back in New York, his blisters healing and muscles relaxing, McMurtry is 30 pounds lighter and feeling great. He says demystifying Parkinson’s has been an important achievement of the project. “I want people to realize that there’s nothing wrong with me — I have Parkinson’s disease, and that’s it,” he says.
Pointing out that Parkinson’s patients can be so self-conscious that they become shut-ins, he adds, “We want to get people out of the shadows, to give them the courage to live with the disease.”
http://nypost.com/2016/06/27/heres-what-its-like-to-walk-500-miles-with-parkinsons-disease/
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