Michael J. Fox opened up about his recent health scares in a new interview.
The Back to the Future actor, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991, told the New York Times Magazine that he had a “recurring problem” with his spinal cord. “I was told it was benign but if it stayed static I would have diminished feeling in my legs and difficulty moving. Then all of a sudden I started falling — a lot,” he said. “It was getting ridiculous. I was trying to parse what was the Parkinson’s and what was the spinal thing. But it came to the point where it was probably necessary to have surgery.” Fox had the surgery and did the physical surgery, and “and eventually people asked me to do some acting,” he said. But in August 2018, he fell down and “fractured the hell out of my arm. I ended up getting 19 pins and a plate. It was such a blow.”
“I don’t talk about things being ‘for a reason.’ 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.” (Via)
Fox, who had a recurring arc on the Kiefer Sutherland drama Designated Survivor last year, still believes in a cure for Parkinson’s, despite his setbacks. “I realized that the understanding I’d reached with Parkinson’s was sincere, but risked being glib. I’d made peace with the disease but presumed others had that same relationship when they didn’t,” he said. “Then when I started to deal with the effects from the spinal surgery, I realized: Wow, it can get a lot worse. Being in a position where I couldn’t walk and had health aides 24 hours a day, was I still prepared to say, ‘Hey, chin up!’ Parkinson’s, it’s a strange test.”
For the rest of the interview, head to the New York Times Magazine.
