Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: PublicAffairs; 1st edition (May 22, 2001)
ISBN: 1586480375
Price: $20.95
This country has an aversion to sickness and death, two things that will in time touch each and every one of us. Not a pleasant thought.
For 18 years I watched my own mother combat, with no hope of winning, the same illness Milly is fighting. Morton Kondracke is to be commended for sharing Milly's story. Heart wrenching, Saving Milly is by no means an easy read, but it is a must read. It is more than a story about Parkinson's disease. It's also a story about love and commitment and, yes, obligation, but also of politics. And all of it will open your eyes as well as your heart.
Kondracke doesn't sugar coat Parkinson's, he displays it in all of its vulgarity. Nor does he paint himself a saint in being Milly's primary caregiver. He gets angry with her, loses his temper, shouts at her. But it's not really Milly he is angry with. It's the Parkinson's. Yet how does one vent one's rage at a disease?
He also writes of the politics of Parkinson's, how, unlike cancer and AIDS, research for this debilitating disease is under funded. Kondracke shares his story with a journalistic detachment, but even so the reader will find him or herself moved by his plight and the plight of Milly. His message is simple: a cure for Parkinson's has been agonizingly near for a long time, but money is needed now. He knows that were a cure discovered tomorrow it would be too late to help Milly, but his fight goes on so that others might be saved from suffering her fate.
My hat is off to Morton Kondracke for sharing this side of his life, a side that one day most of us will experience firsthand, but also one which too many don't wish to glimpse, preferring instead to pretend it won't ever happen to them.
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