Michael J. Fox has opened up about his battle with Parkinson’s disease, and recent spinal cord problem that caused him ‘difficulty moving’.
In an interview with The New York Times, Michael J. Fox, 57, discussed new health challenges he’s been facing amid his more than 20-year battle with Parkinson’s disease – including a shock spinal cord problem.
The Back to the Future star, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991, detailed the impact of his spinal cord injury to the publication.
“I was having the recurring problem with my spinal cord,” the actor said. “I was told it was benign, but if it stayed static I would have diminished feeling in my legs and difficulty moving.”
Fox, who shot to fame in the ’80s, said the issues were “getting ridiculous”, and at one point, he was trying to differentiate which symptoms were coming from his Parkinson’s and which were from his spinal ailment.
“It came to the point where it was probably necessary to have surgery. So I had surgery, and an intense amount of physical therapy after. I did it all, and eventually people asked me to do some acting. Last August I was supposed to go to work. I woke up, walked into the kitchen to get breakfast, misstepped and I went down. I fractured the hell out of my arm. I ended up getting 19 pins and a plate. It was such a blow,” he said.
He told the magazine the latest step in his health journey was spinal surgery he underwent in April, a decision he made after constantly falling.
When asked how he dealt with the setback, Fox said he tried not to get too “New Age-y.”
“I don’t talk about things being ‘for a reason’,” he said.
“But I do think the more unexpected something is, the more there is to learn from it. In my case, what was it that made me skip down the hallway to the kitchen thinking I was fine when I’d been in a wheelchair six months earlier?
“It’s because I had certain optimistic expectations of myself, and I’d had results to bear out those expectations, but I’d had failures too. And I hadn’t given the failures equal weight,” Fox told The New York Times.
Fox is now on the road to recovery and working on a new book about his health issues.
