Baking a cake takes Maureen Brisson twice as long as it used to.

“I would whip over and get the cake pan but now I dawdle. The mixer tools in the drawer don’t jump out at me. It takes a lot of fumbling around. It’s as though I’m working at 50 per cent,” says Maureen.

“Everything is slow. My movements are slow. My thinking is slow. My fingers don’t work as well as they should.”

Maureen, 63, has Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects about 100,000 Canadians. The most common symptoms are tremor, slowness and stiffness, balance problems and muscle rigidity.

The average age of onset of Parkinson’s disease is 60, but it can affect people as young as 30 or 40.

Maureen says the diagnosis, at 57, put an early end to her career as an administrative assistant. “My fingers no longer flew across the keyboard. I also couldn’t take the stress of the job. People don’t realize that there are a lot of internal things going on.”

Depression is an occasional visitor. Maureen fears her grandchildren “will never know the real Maureen because she sort of disappeared when the Parkinson’s came along.”

But not entirely. Although Maureen used to be a runner and did a marathon when she was 40; she can still complete a five-kilometre run with some determination. Taking walks and going to the gym for stretch, strength and toning exercises help boost her sense of physical accomplishment.

As chair of the Lunenburg-Queens County Parkinson’s Support Group, Maritime Region, Maureen leads a support group that includes people with Parkinson’s, family members and two nurses. The group launched the first Porridge for Parkinson’s fundraising breakfast in Nova Scotia in 2007.

For someone who didn’t tell anyone she had Parkinson’s for over a year because of the “shame”, Maureen has become quite outspoken. “I’d like people to know that lives change forever after the diagnosis: adjustments have to be made; future plans go up in smoke. Not all the changes are detrimental but they can alter people’s personalities. Keep that in mind when you see a person with a debilitating disease such as Parkinson’s.”