The month of May has several days celebrating special things. One of my favorites is May 25, 2017—National Chardonnay Day! On a more serious note, May 6 through 12 was National Nurses Week, which got me to thinking about the nurses who have made an impression on my life.

One of my first nursing memories is of our school nurse, Mrs. Hagan. School nurses today probably have a whole lot more to contend with than the tummy aches and bumps and bruises that Mrs. Hagan treated when I was a kid. I’m sure today school nursing is a challenging but rewarding job.

In my teens I had the not so great experience of spending months at Massachusetts General Hospital, recuperating from a major illness. My parents lived an hour away, and my mother made the trek every morning to see me and then home again each afternoon to take care of my father and two sisters.

The hospital was a pretty lonely experience after my mother left each day.

I distinctly remember the day I realized my father had something wrong with him.

It was 1992, and my husband and I had recently moved to California. My parents came for their first visit to see us from their home in Cape Cod.

One day on our way to lunch, my mother and I were walking behind my husband and my father, who were chatting about golf.

I noticed my father was holding his right hand in a fist and that he seemed, ever so slightly, to be walking with a different gait. I asked my mother if she had noticed this and she said yes.

We mentioned it to my father, who agreed to see a doctor upon his return home.

He did, and although his general physician did not make a formal diagnosis at the time, he suggested a number of things my father’s symptoms could mean. He recommended my father make an appointment with a neurologist.

My father told me later that as he and my mother entered the neurologist’s office the following week, the neurologist immediately said to my him, “I am pretty sure you have Parkinson’s disease.”

It was quite a shock for them to hear and, of course, it was a life-changing diagnosis.