Please Stop

By Claude Bachand

"Please Stop" is a memoir about the life of Dotty and Claude Bachand, their deep and enduring love, and how they coped with Parkinson's disease. When Dotty was forty-eight years old, Claude began to notice that Dotty's right hand would tremble occasionally. Other symptoms followed, and two years later a neurologist diagnosed Dotty as suffering from Parkinson's disease. About forty percent of this memoir deals, in depth, with how Dotty and Claude went about their lives as the Parkinson's steadily worsened.Initially, with medication, Dotty was able to function at nearly normal levels, but slowly, inexorably, her problems worsened. Mobility became a major challenge -- walking around, getting in and out of a chair and her bed, and dressing and undressing. Increasing dosages in medication improved Dotty's mobility but created serious side effects such as imbalance, hallucinations, and disorientation. The imbalance resulted in several falls, and twice Claude had to rush Dotty to the emergency room. As the disease progressed, Dotty experienced new symptoms such as drooling, difficulty with swallowing, with talking, and eventually, with dyskinesia -- the twisting and sometimes violent writhing of arms, legs, and head. Dotty resisted using medical aids -- for example, a lift chair or a speaking apparatus -- because those were evidence of new, negative milestones in her battle against Parkinson's, milestones she was unwilling to acknowledge or accept. Through it all the couple continued to enjoy life as best they could, and they had a happy marriage. They'd go out for lunch or dinner two or three times a week, share a bag of popcorn at the movies, take a cruise, and visit friends and relatives. At the movies, they'd sit in the back row, in case dyskinesia came on. In a restaurant Claude would ask the waiter to put Dotty's iced tea in a paper cup with a lid. He'd carry men's handkerchiefs everywhere they went, periodically handing Dotty a fresh one as she was drooling. The opening chapters of the book introduce you to Dotty and Claude in the years before the onset of her Parkinson's, starting when they were born in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. They lived in three-decker tenements in the small mill town of Southbridge, Massachusetts. Money was scarce in their households because of difficult economic times and because both of their fathers spent every night in a barroom, a good portion of their meager earnings going for beer and highballs. In Dotty's case, her father was abusive to her mother. He didn't abuse Dotty, though, having little reason to because she was so well-behaved at home and a good student at school. Claude, on the other hand, as a youngster was a bit of a scamp who underachieved and constantly misbehaved. His mother and teachers, frustrated, resorted to whacking him with a switch or a yardstick. As early as age ten, Claude smoked cigarette butts picked out of the gutter, and he eventually resorted to shoplifting to help with his nicotine habit. As a teenager, he spent his nights in pool halls and bowling alleys. Yet, with financial aid from the G.I. Bill, he became an excellent student in college, earning a bachelor's and master's degree in journalism, and he went on to a successful career in reporting, public relations and marketing. Despite living within a half-mile of each other, Dotty and Claude didn't meet until they were in their mid-twenties. They were married in 1963 and within three years had three children. A driving goal was to have all three children complete college, and Dotty and Claude fashioned their lives with that end in mind, encouraging the children to read, limiting television to an hour a day, and carefully monitoring their progress in school. All three children did, in fact, graduate from college. A few years after their graduations, Dotty showed her first sign of Parkinson's.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1463730276
• ISBN13: 9781463730277
• Release Date: February 2012
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 294 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.7" x 5.3"