Kevin Luke looks out the window while following flight instruction from flight instructor Gregory Love at Silverhawk Aviation in Lincoln March 10, 2017. Luke said that he feels blessed to fly planes despite his diagnosis with Parkinson's disease 10 years ago.
LINCOLN — The skies blaze blue through the cockpit windows. The air outside is chilly, but mostly still. A fine day to fly.
The pilot settles in, his headset on, eyes scanning the instrument panel of the Cessna 182. He checks the dials, listens carefully to the staccato messages from air traffic control sputtering through the radio in his ear.
He’s done this before, many times. He knows how to handle this plane and others like it. But these days, each flight is a gift. One he doesn’t take for granted.
“Lincoln tower, this is Cessna 756 Mike. Ready for taxi,” he says into the headset. This is the part that gives him trouble these days. The radio. So many scraps of information to keep straight. To repeat quickly, clearly into the microphone. The man sitting next to him — his co-pilot, the reason he’s able to fly today — handles most of it for him.
The plane speeds down the runway. The pilot grips the throttle, a plunger protruding from the panel just to his right, and pushes it forward. This, he will say later, is what Cessna pilots call going “balls to the wall,” pushing the “ball” end of the throttle in, generating maximum power for takeoff.
Sure enough, the sky takes hold, hoisting the plane higher and higher and higher above Lincoln’s Silverhawk Aviation.
And for the next hour or so, the pilot, Kevin Luke, will be free.
About 15 years ago, Luke was working on an instrument panel in the C-119G “Flying Boxcar” when he noticed his hands were shaking.
Months later, at his full-time job as division manager in the Allstate insurance company’s marketing department, his phone rang. It was his doctor’s office.
The voice on the line delivered the news bluntly: Luke had Parkinson’s disease. He had probably had it for at least 10 years already. It was a degenerative disease that would affect his day-to-day life. He could plan on working for another five years — maybe longer, if he gave up his management job.
Luke wasn’t sitting in a private room when the call came. The disease hadn’t waited until he had a moment to himself. It had crashed into his life like a meteor. And soon it began to seep into every part of it, threatening to rob him of the things he loved most.
Parkinson’s didn’t care that ever since he was a boy growing up in Salt Lake City, Luke has loved airplanes. That he once dreamed of becoming a Navy pilot, and would have if his hearing had been better. That he earned his pilot’s license when he was in college and flew whenever he had the chance until marriage, a career and family made it difficult.
Parkinson’s didn’t care that Luke spent nearly every Saturday at the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum near Ashland, taking apart and putting together retired military aircraft, just because he liked being close to the old beasts.
The disease has tried to take these pieces of his life from him. But he hasn’t let it.
Kevin Luke leaves a flying lesson in a Cessna 182 at Silverhawk Aviation in Lincoln March 10, 2017. Luke first learned how to fly a plane in college in 1970.
Today, Luke, 65, flies every other month, accompanied by a professional flight instructor. He still pulls himself out of bed early every Saturday morning at his Lincoln home and heads to the SAC museum where, bit by bit, he’s refurbishing an old B-36 bomber, a project that’s taken him at least a decade.
He bowls every morning to exercise and strengthen his balance. He volunteers as the executive secretary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Beatrice. He travels with his wife, Janet, around the country, visiting children and grandchildren.
It’s not always easy. Parkinson’s affects the brain as well as the body. He takes medications five times a day — 5, 8 and 11 a.m., 2 and 5 p.m. — that sometimes cause involuntary muscle movements, making him appear restless. When they wear off, he crashes immediately, breaking out in a cold sweat, his limbs turning sluggish and stiff until he takes his next dose. The disease slurs his speech and causes short-term memory loss. He sleeps only four to five hours a night. Most days, he wakes up about 1 a.m.
He tries to schedule his life around his medication, planning the things he likes to do when he knows he’ll be at his most spry. But sometimes it’s hard to forget that he has a probe implanted in his head, which sends electrical pulses to his brain cells to stop his tremors. It’s hard not to worry that at any moment the medication could wear off and he would be stuck fighting his own body.
“Not a day goes by that you don’t think about it,” Luke said.
Coping with Parkinson’s, like any chronic disease, is about addressing emotional health as well as physical, experts say. Depression and anxiety are common among patients.
And there are a lot of patients.
Parkinson’s is the second-most-common neurodegenerative disorder in the world, after Alzheimer’s disease. About 7 million to 10 million people worldwide have Parkinson’s, 1 million of them in the United States. Nebraska has one of the highest rates of Parkinson’s per capita in the country.
Last year marked the 200th anniversary of the discovery of the disease by English surgeon Dr. James Parkinson, who observed what he called a “shaking palsy” in some of his patients.
It emerges when cells that control our “automatic pilot,” located in the middle part of the brain, begin to die off, said Dr. John Bertoni, professor and co-director of the Parkinson’s disease clinic at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
This affects many of the movements we learn early in life: how to stand up, how to walk, how to roll over in bed.
A person with Parkinson’s can be walking toward a doorway and stop suddenly, unable to take another step. The muscles are capable, but the signal isn’t making it from the brain to the legs.
“It’s like you have a clicker on your TV but the batteries are low. You can push that clicker as hard as you want, but it won’t change the channel,” Bertoni said.
As the disease progresses, problems with thinking and memory may arise. In later stages, dementia is common.
Researchers are still trying to determine what causes Parkinson’s, Bertoni said. Evidence suggests there are genetic as well as environmental factors that could contribute to the disease.
For the past 20 years, Nebraska has maintained a Parkinson’s registry to track cases within the state and identify potential risk factors. To mark the 20th anniversary of the registry, Gov. Pete Ricketts declared last Oct. 30 Parkinson’s Disease Awareness Day.
Parkinson’s itself isn’t fatal, Bertoni said. But as symptoms worsen, they can lead to accidents and injuries that prove to be. There’s the risk of choking, or pneumonia associated with trouble swallowing. Limited movement can lead to dangerous falls.
But in addressing a patient showing signs of Parkinson’s, Bertoni is careful to emphasize the positive. A definitive diagnosis, after all, is never 100 percent certain, he tells them. Doctors can’t be sure until they’re able to dissect a patient’s brain.
Bertoni tells patients of treatments that can dramatically improve their quality of life, like medicine that boosts dopamine in the brain and improves movement. He tells them to eat right — Parkinson’s can affect smell and taste, meaning patients often grab for sweet, salty junk food.
He tells them to exercise regularly: It can help with depression, and in some cases improves mobility and balance.
And he tells them to keep doing the things that make them happy.
“I’ll say ‘OK, you may have 20 to 30 more years,’ ” he said. “ ‘What are you going to do to make sure you have 20 or 30 good years?’ ”
On Saturdays, Luke rises early and makes the 30-mile journey north from Lincoln to Ashland. Since the SAC museum opened in its current location in 1998, Luke has spent weekends there as a volunteer in the museum’s Durham Restoration Gallery, readying the old aircraft for public display.
He can do it all, said Dan Kirwan, Saturday supervisor at the museum. In total, Luke estimates he’s worked on seven or eight planes over his years as a volunteer; he’s tracked the progression of his disease by remembering what plane he was working on when certain symptoms emerged.
But there’s one plane the weekend volunteers know is Luke’s territory: the B-36 Peacemaker, a massive aircraft built to carry nuclear payloads after World War II. Luke’s been working on it for 10 years.
“It’s kind of nice they do that,” he said. “It shows they have some faith in my skills.”
Piece by piece he’s made the plane look like new. Luke has meticulously documented the interior in an album filled with hundreds of photos that help him remember where everything goes.
No detail goes overlooked. When he goes home, he designs and prints historically accurate decals for instruments in the plane. When the Parkinson’s caused a tremor in his right hand, he taught himself to use the computer mouse with his left.
“Kevin’s one of those guys who gets his teeth into a project, and he will see it through to the end,” Kirwan said. “He’ll find ways to get the job done. Innovate whatever he has to. The results he gets are just incredible.”
These days, Luke is measuring the work he has left on the B-36 in months rather than years. Finishing will give him more time to focus on his other great aeronautical pursuit.
Luke earned his private pilot’s license during his first year of college in Utah. He spent two years in the Army, got married and had eight children, all of which left little time to fly. The family moved to Lincoln more than 20 years ago, when Luke’s job with Allstate transferred him there. Then came his diagnosis.
“When I found out I had Parkinson’s, I thought I needed to go back and (fly). I didn’t want to leave that behind,” Luke said.
Though his pilot’s license is still valid, the Parkinson’s means Luke can no longer pass the medical certification required for active pilots. To fly, he needs a co-pilot who is medically cleared.
So about three years ago he reached out to Greg Love, a certified flight instructor based in Lincoln, and explained his situation. Since then, about once every other month, Luke pays Love for an hour to an hour and a half in the air.
“I’ve flown with a couple of guys who had medical issues, but it was maybe once or twice over a long period. Nothing consistent like Kevin,” Love said.
The two men have had frank conversations about how Luke’s disease affects his flying. Love can take over operation of the plane if he thinks he needs to. And Luke has asked Love to say if Love ever feels Luke’s not healthy enough to work the controls. If that day comes, Love said, he won’t be shy about making the point. But so far, Luke hasn’t done anything to worry him.
The only real problem Luke has right now is speaking on the radio. Love can tell it frustrates him. In the busy airspace above Lincoln, he said responses need to be quick and clear. The Parkinson’s has damaged Luke’s short-term memory, so Love handles most of the radio calls once the plane is in the air.
Luke knows that eventually — who knows when? — his symptoms will prevent him from flying. He doesn’t feel like he’s close to that point yet. But when it comes, it will be painful.
Once you’ve touched the sky, it’s hard to stay on the ground.
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