When Richelle Flanagan was diagnosed 10 years ago with young-onset Parkinson’s disease, she thought she would no longer be able to play hockey – a sport for which she had previously earned 23 senior caps for Ireland.
Yet in August she pulled on the green jersey once again to play in the Masters World Cup in Belgium. She may struggle to type and text, but put a hockey stick into her hand and nobody would know she has a neurodegenerative disorder, characterised by slowness and stiffness of movement.
“When I step on the pitch, I feel like I don’t have Parkinson’s,” says the 57-year-old, a dietitian who spoke to The Irish Times in 2022 about how she hid her diagnosis from extended family and friends for several years due to stigma around brain diseases. She played in all six of the over-55 team’s World Cup matches and scored three goals, with the team finishing sixth overall.
Before one of the matches, “I said to a friend: ‘Just watch me try to move the mouse and type.’ And she couldn’t get over how I couldn’t. I was looking at the mouse, willing my finger to click, and I couldn’t.”
After one match in which she struggled at the end, she realised she had gone over time for her dopamine medication, which she must take every 2½ hours. The team’s quarter-final loss to Argentina was also a challenge, as it was played in 37 degrees and Parkinson’s affects the body’s ability to deal with heat. “I definitely had a few dizzy episodes. I just made sure I had electrolytes, drank plenty of water and took breaks. But that was tough going.”
Unsure quite how to explain her continuing hockey prowess, Flanagan believes it may be partly due to paradoxical kinesis. This is where somebody with Parkinson’s disease may not be able to walk, she says, “but stick them on a bike and they can suddenly cycle”.
Dr David Bradley, consultant neurologist at St James’s Hospital in Dublin, describes paradoxical kinesis as a phenomenon whereby a person with Parkinson’s experiences a sudden, transient return of normal and fluid movement, allowing them to complete a task or movement that would usually be difficult or impossible due to their condition.
“It is often described with specific cues [visual or auditory], practised movements [for example, riding a bicycle or sporting movements] or in situations of heightened alertness, emotion or threat. It is thought to result from activation of brain structures separate from the main movement centres affected by Parkinson’s,” he said.
Flanagan wonders also about the motivational effect of doing an activity she loves. As Parkinson’s causes dopamine levels to drop significantly, “a lot of people suffer from apathy, anhedonia, lack of joy in life”. There is another neurological circuit, which appears to be stimulated by reward and emotion and may be able to compensate for that lack, she suggests.
Research shows that exercise is one of the best things to do to slow the progression of Parkinson’s. “Not everybody is an exercise bunny,” she says, but dancing is also highly recommended.
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Flanagan, co-founder of mymovesmatter.com for women living with Parkinson’s, hopes to make the cut for the European Masters championships next year. But “we have trials, it’s not a given, and I don’t know what I am going to be like next year”.
Her condition has progressed over the past decade and she is now dealing with twitching muscles, causing weight loss. Options may include the surgical procedure of deep brain stimulation, which she is not keen on, or new, pump-administered medication that is incompatible with contact sport.
It is a question, she says, of weighing up the positives of treatments that help with symptoms, against the negative of not being to do what motivates her and keeps her going.