When i was first diagnosed my doctor said probably by the time you were 40
you would be in a wheelchair. Today i'm 43 years old there's not a wheelchair in
sight. My name is Jimmy Choi and i was diagnosed with young onset Parkinson's at the age of 27.
I met Cheryl in high school actually so we were high school sweethearts
he was the jack i was the nerd in high school it was two proms and one homecoming and then
we got married almost immediately after after we graduated from college my dad always said
when you get married ready to start a family you buy life insurance protect your family
so that's what i did and it was actually the nurse that came out and did my physical that noticed
things about me that i had never even thought of before i didn't want to believe that it was
parkinson's i felt powerless because i didn't know what parkinson's was i took the medication and for
the next eight years my regimen never changed i started gaining uh quite a bit of weight actually
it was about 240 to 250 pounds and i was falling over quite a bit so i had to walk with a cane
everything became hard so frustration was said it my rock bottom moment really came when i was
carrying my then 10 month old son mason down the stairs and i lost my balance and the two of us
went tumbling down an entire flight of stairs it was terrifying is this what i have become a safety
hazard to my family nice job way to hustle out there huh that fall made me think what can i do
to better my situation there is no cure it made me want to see what i can do to change that
there were clinical trials out there all over the place so i figured hey that was going to be
what i can do a lot of the studies that have been done in the in recent years are around exercise
i first became interested in studying the effect of exercise on people with parkinson's disease
in about 2001 my area of scholarship is to look at how you activate a muscle when you make a movement
people with parkinson's disease are weak so a combination of being weaker and having abnormal
muscle activation patterns led me to propose a research study to look at the effect of
resistance exercise progressive resistance exercise dramatically reduces the signs of
parkinson's disease and that's what we showed the exercise protocol that jimmy has just been using
the details were published in the new york times last year so people a result they were stronger
they were faster their muscle activation patterns improved and they were very happy
the more physical activity that i was doing it was making me feel better and i figured you know what
if this is making me feel better i'm going to do more of it when i told karina that i was going to
be on american interior for the first time i think she squealed louder than anything i've ever heard
she was certainly more excited than i was for me there was it was panic you know what did i
get myself into so northwestern medicine candy cane came in to help what does it
mean for him to take on that challenge and also what does that mean for his medication
and training today compared to eight years ago i'm about half of the medication that i used to
take it's not just halting the progression it really is giving myself back a couple of years
that i may have lost so if you have parkinson's disease a lot of things go wrong and so you need
all kinds of specialists to help you and major medical centers have access to that
they have terrific expertise and they can actually help with all aspects of the disease
when i think about my care team at northwestern i think about my friends because over the years that
really that's what they have become they accept my craziness in terms of trying to get to that next
level and i think that made a great relationship people ask me all the time you run you know a
marathon in three hours and 40 minutes or you're able to compete on american ninja warrior for
three years in a row can you imagine how much stronger you would be or how much faster you would
be if you weren't diagnosed with parkinson's my response is very simple if i was never diagnosed
with parkinson's i wouldn't be doing these things