“I’m 60 years old and I’m happy to walk like I’m 90,” says Michael J. Fox in There is no better time than the futurehis recent memoir in which he recounts how he coped with the parkinson’s and narrates it in a “less sweetened” way, as the United States press points out. The actor talks about alcoholism and also explains why he decided to retire from acting in 2020.
Fox begins the book narrating how he felt months before undergoing surgery for a benign tumor on his back that could leave him paralyzed. “Nobody wants to be the surgeon who left Michael J. Fox in a wheelchair. After my operation, everyone had repeated the same message to me daily: you have to worry about one thing, not to fall. And yet here I am. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade, they say. Well, I feel like closing my lemonade kiosk.”
His diagnosis was received in 1991, when the movie Back to the Future grossed 200 million dollars at the box office. “The doctor told me that I could surely continue working for another 10 years, and I was only 29 at the time.” But he explains that his health condition worsened five years ago. “These are symptoms that become tolerable over time. Much more complicated is accepting the decreased ability to move.
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Although he underwent successful surgery in 2018, he had to undergo rehabilitation to regain mobility. “The operation has made me dependent to unbearable levels. Every time I go to the bathroom I feel watched like a newborn in its bath time, and what starts as a simple mumble soon turns into an angry complaint.
But Michael J. Fox continued acting and, that same year, the filmmaker Spike Lee I had proposed him to make a cameo in the movie See You Yesterdaywhich had a nod to Return to the future. The actor had to cancel his participation because he fell in his apartment. “My family has carried all my m… and has only asked me in return to be careful; but I have laughed at them. It’s been four months since the operation and I just risked the health and safety of my family by being a fool.”
He acknowledges that his latest operations, such as the 19 screws that were put in, further complicated his quality of life. “Although it seems contradictory, I find it easier to accept Parkinson’s and my spinal problems than my fractured humerus. The first two have been with me for years and have taken over me, deadly and insidiously. Instead, the arm thing was sudden, like an explosion. A cataclysm. I am not prepared for the consequences. My mood darkens. I’m living the life of a retired person, only 10 years ahead of schedule. My world contracts, not expands. In terms of the space-time continuum, I am closer to my exit point than my entry point. Whatever my physical circumstances are right now, I face them and move on. If I fall I get up. The last thing we run out of is precisely the future.”
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And Fox says that his participation in the series of the comedian Larry David where he makes a cameo and jokes about Parkinson’s was successful. He had spent years hiding his illness, to such an extent that when he acted in ‘Spin City’ “he made the public wait” because he stayed in the dressing room trying to “calm down” the tremors with blows. “What Larry proposed took situations to the limit. I suppose it could have been a disaster if people, especially Parkinson’s patients and their families, had mistaken my disposition for self-parody, but I found it liberating. After so many years of trying to hide my symptoms, sometimes over-medicating myself to achieve and maintain some kinetic stability, anything could finally happen.”