Michael J. Fox: 'I was supposed to be disabled by now'

Michael J. Fox has spoken candidly about his 25-year struggle with Parkinson’s Disease, and how he was told at the age of 29 that he’d only be able to work for another 10 years.

Fox, now 55, told Haute Living that it was setting up his foundation, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, which seemed to turn things around for him.

“I realized it was a real awakening to me because I had been kind of keeping this secret,” he said.

“I was diagnosed 25 years ago, and I was only supposed to work for another 10 years. I was supposed to be pretty much disabled by now.

“I’m far from it. This is as bad as I get, and I can still go to the store and go marketing.”

Since the foundation was launched in 2000, it has amassed a massive $650 million in research funding into the disease, with Fox adding that he’s ‘in business to go out of business’, and hoping to eliminate the disease in our lifetime.

“Biology is really hard, and you come into these things and say, ‘Let’s wrap this up in five years.’ And then you realize if you wrap this up in 25 years, then you’re doing great,” he added.

“So we’re trying to get things in the pipeline that may be curative and therapeutic to a point where that would resemble a cure. If we can halt progression and diminish symptoms, then I’ll take that.”

Fox suffers from the tremors that are associated with the disease of the nervous system, but works to control them through meditation.

“The only way I don’t move, in even the subtlest ways, is when I’m sleeping. The brain activity is to a point where you’re not moving, you don’t move. I don’t shift in my sleep. If I shift, I’m awake,” he said.

“I’m the same way when I do meditation. If I do it sincerely, then my brain slows down enough that my body gets still.

“The biggest problem I have now is balance. That’s kind of tricky because you fall down a couple of times at 55 and you realize that you’re not 25.”

Fox still does acting work, despite his condition, devising the sitcom ‘The Michael J. Fox Show’, loosely based on his own life.

But the show was eventually cancelled by NBC, after 22 episodes.

“In the pilot, we hit the right note. But then we lost that, I think,” he said “They got afraid of the Parkinson’s, and they didn’t want to go all the way.

“I kept saying, ‘If we do this in a certain way, there’s a way to go. There’s a path forward here. There are certainly some wrong paths we could take that could be disastrous, but it’s worth trying to make that journey.’ We never got there in time, and that’s why we only got to the first season.”

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