”It was clear to me that Rush Limbaugh does not understand the illness,” Dr. Eger said, anger perceptible in his vivid blue eyes. ”It’s one thing to disagree with Michael on stem cells, but another to attack him and his illness, which I feel is unethical.”
Dr. Eger, 61, is a clinical psychologist here whose trim white beard and receding hairline give him a resemblance to the father of his profession, minus Freud’s cigar. Six years ago, his wife, Jane, noticed that his hand was lingering awkwardly on his dinner plate. He also couldn’t move his fingers deftly. He figured he had strained a nerve lifting weights. A neurologist told him otherwise.
”You have a problem,” the doctor said.
Parkinson’s, thought to affect a million Americans and, according to the Parkinson’s Support Group of Westchester, an estimated 300 people in the county, destroys brain cells that release the chemical messenger dopamine and progressively wears away at movement, mood, speech and memory. Symptoms can be restrained with drugs like Sinemet, but no cure has been found for the disease.
Most people told of life-altering illnesses fixate on their fate or search for relief. Dr. Eger did, too. He wondered how Jane, a clinical psychologist who shares his office suite, and his children would cope with watching him turn hobbled and frail.
”Instead of anticipating growing old together, it’s one well member of a couple taking care of the sick one,” he said.
But Dr. Eger did more than worry about himself. Like Mr. Fox, he decided to raise money for research. Indeed, a year after the disease was diagnosed, he and his family were vacationing in the Virgin Islands and ran into Mr. Fox outside a restaurant. It was like being told you have polio and running into Franklin Roosevelt.
”I was certainly struck by the coincidence, but I didn’t attribute it to divine intervention,” Dr. Eger said.
The actor was gracious and showed Dr. Eger his baby daughter, Esmé. The meeting, Dr. Eger said, ‘’sort of fired me up” and he focused his fund-raising on the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Working with musician friends like John Stine and Marsha Cheraskin Winokur, he arranged annual chamber music concerts at Rye Country Day School, the latest in October. According to Veronique Enos, the foundation’s major gifts officer, Dr. Eger has raised more than $160,000, one of the largest sums from a grass-roots group.
In doing the hard organizational work, he has taught friends a lesson: The grace and spirit with which we endure illness or dying is as much a measure of our character as the way we go about our most vigorous days.
”I can’t say I do it altruistically,” Dr. Eger said, slipping into the shrink’s role. ”It’s one of my ways of coping with the anxiety and fear that goes along with a dreaded disease. What I’m doing is actively mastering what’s making me feel anxious and worried, and in that way I’m attempting to feel I have some control over what’s happening.”
Sure, Dr. Eger went through standard self-delusions. ”There was a kind of twilight zone when you’re not healthy, but not in pain and not feeling major symptoms: ‘I avoided the bullet. Maybe it’ll just stay mild and progress very, very slowly and I’ll be one of the lucky people.’ ”
But the disease’s ”creeping into all corners of my life” set him straight. He could tell on the faces of his children — Jonathan, a doctoral student in psychology, and Molly, a college freshman — that they noticed the deterioration.
”For a while, they didn’t like to see that I was having difficulty walking and having tremors,” Dr. Eger said. ”They wanted me to be well.”
His patients asked about the trembling. Although psychologists often avoid revealing anything personal, turning a question on the patient, this was a subject he could not avoid.
There are discouraging moments. ”It’s easy to imagine the worst,” he said. ”When you see people who aren’t able to function well at all, you feel not only compassion, but you ask yourself: ‘Is that my future?’ ”
But like Mr. Fox, who titled his memoir ”Lucky Man,” Dr. Eger has come to the conclusion, perhaps Pollyannaish but effective, that Parkinson’s opened up new worlds. It has given him a chance to absorb the worst, and, he said, not ”allow myself to be a victim of my illness.” It has taught him that even though there is a fighter inside him who raised all that money, it is all right sometimes to be less self-sufficient, to appreciate a friend’s help for something as small as buttoning a shirt cuff.