Ozzy makes Sharon weep with sad songs of bravery
As Ozzy Osbourne reveals his diagnosis, the women who waited years for theirs
OZZY Osbourne has laid bare his pain at being diagnosed with Parkinson’s in new songs which left wife Sharon in tears.
The rock legend is said to have poured his soul into music he wrote after being diagnosed with the disease last February.
And Sharon said of the album Ordinary Man: “I can’t listen to it all the way through because it makes me cry. I just can’t.”
The lyrics of one song, Under The Graveyard, include the lines: “Today I woke up and I hate myself. Death doesn’t answer when I cry for help.”
Ozzy, 71, who was diagnosed after neck surgery, previously told of finding comfort in his music.
He said: “If it wasn’t for this record I’d still be in traction thinking, ‘I’m going to be here forever’. I thought I was dying. But that got me off my **** .”
Meanwhile Sharon, 67, struggled to hold back tears as she opened up on US show The Talk about her husband of 38 years.
The mum of three said: “People have been amazing with their outpouring of love for my husband, and I thank you.”
Sharon said she would take the Black Sabbath singer to consult a professor in Switzerland, vowing: “We are going to go wherever we can go to seek answers.”
Ozzy’s album, out next month, features Elton John and Guns N’ Roses star Duff McKagan.
WHEN Janet Kerr was 42, she began experiencing a sharp burning pain in her hip. The energetic hillwalker from Fife was busy training to be a teacher so dismissed it until her husband urged her to see her GP.
He diagnosed “trapped nerves” and prescribed her painkillers, but the dosage kept on going up. As did Janet’s list of symptoms. “I presented my leg feeling like a log and my leg stride shortening,” she says. “Walking didn’t feel like a natural process.”
Three years later, she noticed a tremor in her hand. “My GP was convinced that was because of an old horse-riding accident that had come back to haunt me,” she says. “But it had been a hairline fracture of my elbow so why would that cause a tremor a few years later?”
What her doctor had missed was that Janet had early onset Parkinson’s, the degenerative neurological condition that damages brain cells and limits movement. While Parkinson’s is not fatal itself, advanced symptoms can reduce life expectancy.
Despite visiting her GP 15 times, Janet says Parkinson’s was never mentioned once, even when she stopped being able to swing her arm. “I got the impression he was fed up with me and was palming me off because I had seen him a number of times about the pain,” she says.
“I felt frustrated and belittled but also insignificant as he wasn’t listening to me. It was stressful as I knew there was something wrong.”
She was sent for nerve conduction testing in Edinburgh in October 2015 to rule out a suspected neck injury but felt increasingly despondent.
Then by chance two months later, she happened to watch a television show about people with Parkinson’s who had benefited from ballet.
“The cameraman focused on the woman’s hand and I thought, ‘That’s like my hand’,” Janet says.
Believing it to be a breakthrough, she told her GP her Parkinson’s suspicions. “He scoffed at me and told me not to be silly,” she recalls. “I felt like a small child being chastised.”
Thankfully, her specialist had separately contacted a hospital neurology department in Fife and Janet underwent tests not long after.
At the end she was asked by the attending consultant what she thought she had. “I said, ‘I know what it is. I have Parkinson’s’, and the doctor replied, ‘Yes, that’s what I strongly believe as well’.”
Three months later, the test results confirmed Janet’s suspicions. All in all, it had taken five years for her to get a diagnosis.
As a one-off, this case would be alarming, but disturbingly Janet is no anomaly. A recent poll of 2,000 people by Parkinson’s UK found a quarter with the disease were initially misdiagnosed. When you looked at the statistics for women alone, they were even more likely to be misdiagnosed. A fifth of people had to see their GP three or more times before being referred to a medical specialist and nearly half of those misdiagnosed received treatment for a non-existent condition, with 34 per cent saying their health had suffered as a result. Martha Holley is one. Her Parkinson’s was not recognised for a decade despite seeing six GPs at three surgeries. “I don’t think any of them really took me seriously at all,” she says.
Martha’s problems started in her 20s with soreness in her foot and ankle. By her early 30s things had worsened, while she was also plagued by exhaustion and depression. She decided to seek help.
“My toenails kept going black on my left foot because I was walking on my tiptoes and I had a constant painful sprained ankle but the doctor kept dismissing it as anxiety.”
Martha says her mental health was deteriorating – due to work stress and an inability to do the things she loved like snowboarding – but believes it was not the root cause of her upset. “One of the symptoms I did not realise at the time was that anxiety and depression is quite a major part of Parkinson’s symptoms,
which also went unrecognised in the context of the disease.
“I spent a long time just blaming myself for everything,” she says. “I thought it was my fault why I was not doing well at work and why I couldn’t keep up with friends.”
By 2012 she was “crawling around on my hands and knees” at home in the evenings because it was easier and less painful.
She then spent four years on Parkinson’s medication for a genetic condition called doparesponsive dystonia, which shares the same symptoms of the disease but is not related to it. She was also seeing a neurologist.
“It was only my own research that associated Parkinson’s,” she says, explaining how watching a Facebook video of a girl in her 20s with the disease changed her life. “I knew instantly that’s what I had,” she says. “She walked exactly the same as me. My left foot was twisting in and wouldn’t respond.”
Martha asked for a DAT scan, a test measuring dopamine levels in the brain used regularly in Parkinson’s diagnosis. The results showed she had it, a decade after her symptoms emerged. “I felt pretty vindicated,” she says of that moment. “My reaction was ‘I told you I was poorly and it was more serious than you had taken it for’.”
Experts do have some sympathy with doctors, saying there is no definitive diagnostic test for Parkinson’s and it is a complex condition with over 40 symptoms.
Katie Goates, of Parkinson’s UK, says: “An additional challenge for health professionals is that Parkinson’s affects everyone differently, so they may not see the same set of symptoms twice.
The charity is launching a new course soon to help GPs recognise it and refer people rapidly.
Abbie Sanford, 34, from Telford believes it cannot come soon enough, saying current diagnoses “depend on the skill of your doctor”. She was diagnosed in November 2015, at 30, after developing a stiff shoulder and a tremor in her left hand three years prior.
HER mother also had it. “If the diagnosis had been quicker, I am not sure it would have been easier but there wouldn’t have been so many events that made it worse,” she says. Her worst memory was an unsympathetic professor who humiliated her in front of 10 students while she was undergoing rigorous testing at a teaching hospital.
He accused her of copying the same Parkinson’s symptoms as her mother and of having a neurological disorder, implying her symptoms weren’t real, just the result of a problem in her brain’s communication processes.
“I was distraught,” says Abbie, who fled the hospital. “It was my nightmare, I felt like he was saying there is nothing wrong with you.”
That could not have been more wrong.Abbie received a letter three weeks later asking her to attend an appointment where she was told she had Parkinson’s.
Her initial reaction was one of relief. “You start doubting what you are feeling,” she says. Although she maintains she is not angry, she says an earlier diagnosis would have meant less pain.
Janet, who is now 50 and a grandmother, agrees. “Sometimes it’s like somebody with a hot poker touching your skin and they suddenly stab it into you,” she says. “It makes you scream out loud. It’s a constant throbbing and aching and I’ve just learnt to live with it.”
Her advice is always to stand your ground with your GP in pushing for further testing or an appointment with a specialist.
“I was quite a passive patient and if I knew then what I know now, I would have been more aggressive. The only person who is an expert in what is wrong with you is yourself. You know in your heart of hearts there is something wrong.”