Michael J. Fox sets the record straight about his condition 20 years after being diagnosed

Michael J. Fox has been living with Parkinson’s disease for many years. Despite the challenges he has faced with it, he still remains positive.

The star revealed that most people had wrong perceptions about the disease. Goodfullness reported that he clarified some of the rumors and perceptions about the illness.

When Michael J. Fox announced that he was struggling with Parkinson’s disease in 1998, he didn’t expect the way some people reacted to the news. People began to project their own fears about Parkinson’s on him.

The star shared that this was quite difficult for him and he would go out of his way to assure them that he was doing fine. After a while, he just found humor in the way that people perceived the disease.

Fox has admitted that the illness came with plenty of hardships. Despite this, some great things have also come out of it, like the founding of the Michael J. Fox Foundation.

The foundation provided a resource for those who are suffering from Parkinson’s, need financial support, want to get involved, or just want to connect with other people with the same condition. He told AARP Magazine that it opened many doors for him.

“After I made my diagnosis public back in 1998, I began to realize that Parkinson’s gives you two things to reckon with. You deal with the condition, and you deal with people’s perception of the condition.”

Michael J. Fox, Goodfullness, April 16, 2018

Suddenly, doctors were reaching out to him and he did the same. Most important, the Parkinson’s community reached out to the star and this immediately made him feel better.

He felt empowered knowing that there were people who understood what he was going through. The foundation was also empowering for physicians, specialists, and researchers that he began meeting all over the country.

Fox shared that his disease isn’t as tragic as most would assume. “The truth is that on most days, there comes a point where I literally can’t stop laughing at my own symptoms,” he said.

He revealed that his visible symptoms were the most distracting, but that none of them hurt. The only pain he got was on his feet, which sometimes shuffled and curled up in cramps when he was asleep.

For this purpose, the star kept a very stiff pair of shoes on the floor next to his bed.