Shell Shock

Walking home one day from a trip to the corner store, I spied an old man coming toward me down the sidewalk, half jogging, stumbling, stooped over, going faster and faster, his upper body stretching farther and farther out in front of his frantically moving feet as his lower body scrambled to keep up. A block away, he pitched forward onto the pavement. I ran to help and found him sprawled face down, trying valiantly to get up. His palms and elbows were scraped and bleeding, his pants scuffed and dirty at the knees. All the heave I could muster from my sixteen-year-old body helped him stand.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

Raising a trembling finger, he pointed toward a nearby house. We slowly walked there together, me holding one elbow, him shuffling with half steps, hands shaking, head bowed. His daughter answered the doorbell. This was not the first time a stranger had brought her father home.

“Is he OK?” I said.

“Yeah, he’s fine. He just has shell shock from the war.”

I concluded shell shock was some bad juju. A few years later, as a medical student, I understood that what I had seen that day was someone with the stooped posture, tremor, impaired balance and festinating gait of end-stage Parkinson’s disease. Even if his family doctor had made the right diagnosis, and maybe he did, little effective treatment existed until the advent of levodopa, the miracle drug of Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings. 

It was not available in time to help the shell-shocked old veteran.