Basking in the sunshine and glorious heat while on holiday with her best friend Caroline, Janet Barnes decided to send a few postcards to her nearest and dearest at home.
As she sat down to write a message to her aunt, she noticed something strange - her handwriting seemed much smaller than usual.
“I just thought my handwriting was getting worse but Caroline pointed it out. She said: ‘Your Aunt’s going to have trouble reading that’,” Janet, now 49, told The Mirror.
It wasn’t the only change Janet, an artist from Nottingham, had noticed. Always into fitness and exercise, she’d been getting slower and more lethargic over the past months.
“I put it down to getting older,” she said.
But just 47 at the time, Janet’s symptoms started to add up and were unusual. So she took herself to the GP.
“I just mentioned the thing about my handwriting in passing. I was pretty blazé and didn’t even think about it, but my doctor immediately picked up on it and referred me to a neurologist,” Janet said.
“Even then, I still never thought it would be anything serious.”
But the following nine months were a blur of tests and scans as doctors tried to figure out Janet’s diagnosis.
As time went on, one condition kept coming up in conversation with her doctors - Parkinson’s disease.
Janet said: “It soon became clear that I most likely had Parkinson’s, but it was a while before I had a confirmed diagnosis. One way they tend to confirm it is to give you medication for Parkinson’s and see if it works - and it worked for me.”
Although she’d been discussing the condition with her doctors for a long time, Janet described the horror of seeing her diagnosis written down on paper for the first time - at just 47 years old.
“I was absolutely devastated. All your plans for the future are blown away and you can’t see past that,” she recalled.
After calling her husband Simon - who she describes as her “rock” - to give him the news, Janet dialled the number of a close friend who is a paralympic gold medallist.
“He talked me around and told me I can’t change what I’ve been given, but what I can manage is how I respond to it.
“He gave me such wise words and he was right. At first, I was blown off my feet, but he told me I was still the Janet he knew and loved.”
Fuelled with fresh motivation, Janet called pal Caroline and planned a bike trip from London to Paris to raise money for Parkinson’s UK.
“I asked people to sponsor me, not pity me,” defiant Janet said.
And two years on from her diagnosis, Janet says exercise has helped manage her symptoms and she’s now fitter than ever.
“I’ve got muscles where I never had them before. I feel stronger from weight training and because I’ve got a fitter body I can isolate muscles.
“That’s one of the things with Parkinson’s - the freezing and slowing down as the muscles stiffen, but by keeping them moving I can manage that.
“Some of the other symptoms I get like severe fatigue and mood swings are helped by exercise. The endorphins make me feel like I’m ‘normal’,” she said.
As well as regular exercise, Janet found a lifelong friend at a physio programme shortly after she was diagnosed.
“If you’re diagnosed young like I was, it can be harrowing going to group settings where everyone’s a lot older than you. But when I walked into my first session, I saw one woman on the other side of the room who looked a similar age to me and we caught each other’s eyes instantly.
“Her name was Chris and she loved exercising too - from then on we became friends.”
She also attended some Parkinson’s cafes in her area, with specific groups for people who were living with early onset Parkinson’s.
Just before the pandemic hit, Janet wanted to try a new type of exercise and stepped in the boxing ring for the first time.
After doing virtual training sessions during lockdown, Janet floated the idea of organising a charity boxing event with the coaches at her gym - and they were on board immediately.
Janet and partner in crime Caroline have pledged to box for 12 hours straight. While one of them is sparring in the ring, the other will be training on the bag.
“We’ve had to delay it so many times because of Covid but it’ll finally go ahead in a few weeks,” she said.
Since she was first diagnosed, Janet has raised a staggering £10,000 for Parkinson’s UK.
She hopes her story will make people more aware of the condition and its symptoms - but will also highlight that a Parkinson’s diagnosis doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself.
“It seems Parkinson’s is an unfashionable, unknown condition but there are so many people living with it. There are some famous faces who have raised awareness of the disease, like Michael J. Fox and Muhammad Ali but that’s about it.
“I’m impatient and I want to raise awareness of Parkinson’s disease and charities who carry out research into it to find better medicines, and even a cure.
“But mostly, I want people to know that my story isn’t about what I can’t do. It’s about what I can do.”
