When Science Goes Wrong Read Free Page B

but all these things became harder and harder. His doctor frequently increased the dosage of his drugs or added new ones, but they never quite kept up with the advancing disease. Max’s walking became stiff and slow, and getting up from a chair required a great effort. He had to give up running – a terrible blow.
    The Truexes thought that living in Los Angeles might be too demanding for Max, and they decided to move somewhere with a slower pace of life where he might be able to continue with activities such as driving. At the urging of an old Air Force team-mate who lived in Gunnison, Colorado, they moved to that city. Both Max and Kay liked Gunnison. (‘It was like being on vacation,’ says Kay.) But the move did nothing to slow the advance of Max’s disease. He began to experience episodes of ‘freezing’, when he simply got stuck in the middle of what he was doing and couldn’t move at all. His walking became unsteady to the point that he was in constant danger of falling. The tremor in his arms worsened. And after he got into two car accidents in the space of two days, he had to give up driving for good.
    Max remained under the care of his doctor in California, who juggled Max’s drugs as best he could. He was taking about 30 tablets a day, some of them intended to treat the disease, and some to counteract those drugs’ side-effects. As often happens with people with Parkinson’s disease, it became unclear which of his drugs were helping him and which were harming him, and so his doctor decided to take him off all his drugs for a couple of weeks so that he could be ‘re-levelled’. The idea was to reintroduce the drugs one by one, while observing what effects they had. During the time that Max went without the drugs he stayed with Don in Santa Barbara, so Don got to see the full extent of Max’s disease in its untreated state. ‘He came unglued,’ Don told me. ‘He couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t even swallow.’
    The re-levelling may have led to some temporary improvement, but Max soon began to go downhill again. By the mid-1980s, he was having trouble with dressing, cutting up his food, and any other task that required delicate control of movement. His symptoms seemed to change from day to day. ‘If I was paralysed from the waist down,’ Kay remembers him saying, ‘I would know what I could do and what I couldn’t do, but with this I never know whether it’s going to affect my ability to walk, my ability to speak, whether I’m going to shake or not shake, I never know which part of my body is going to go.’
    Max struggled on. As his sons got to the same age as he was when he started running, so did they. Max tried to coach them, but often Kay had to help out. Max’s friends from his college and Air Force days rallied round. Kay recounts how one friend insisted on taking Max and his family to Vail for a skiing vacation: ‘He said, “I don’t care how many times you fall, Max, I’ll pick you up.” And he did.’
    Toward the end of the 1980s, when Max had been battling Parkinson’s disease for nearly a decade, things began to get rapidly worse. As so often happens with L-dopa treatment, the drug had begun to lose some of its effectiveness, and even with the addition of other drugs he was in a serious plight. Now Kay had not only to cut up his food but to lift it to his mouth, too. And his swallowing was impaired almost as severely as when he had been off the drugs entirely: he would choke on his food as often as he swallowed it. Max became quite depressed and anxious about his future.
    One person who followed this decline with great concern was his old track coach, Jim Slosson. When Slosson met Max in 1988, he was devastated to see how this brilliant athlete had been reduced to a shuffling invalid. A little later, Slosson was having dinner with one of his own old track buddies, a half-miler by the name of Paul Iacono, and he told Iacono about Max’s illness. As it happened, Paul had a