It looks like a field sobriety test. There are no blood samples, no brain scans -- just a series of exercises.

“We’re looking for slowness of movement,” Dr. Joseph Jankovic said. “So someone with Parkinson’s would do it at a very slow rate.”

And then Dr. Jankovic has them walk. Before they even turn around and walk back the other way, the Parkinson’s experts, like Dr. Jankovic, will know.

And most will tell their patients straight out: They have a degenerative, neurological disease for which there is no cure.

For Carol Fry it was not so much a diagnosis as it was a sentence.

“He was very cold,” Fry said. “He said, ‘you have Parkinson’s; do you have any questions?’”

Fry was angry at her first doctor, and Kathleen Crist, who directs a support group, said patients often leave feeling that way.

11 News

Dan Lauck

“Feeling really mad, and mad at the process,” Crist said. “It’s a very common complaint.”

And she said most of the time the doctors who make the quick diagnoses are usually right.

“Patients sometimes get frustrated because they would like a confirmation of the diagnosis,” Dr. Jankovic said.

Over the past 30 years, Dr. Jankovic has diagnosed 10,000 patients. He understands the anger.

When I asked him if I was angry, he just laughed.

At the beginning of the day in the news department’s regular morning meeting, my hands show no signs of Parkinson’s-like terrors.

But the deadline is eight hours away. The tremors will come.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m fortunate.   

“The tremor-dominate Parkinson’s generally has a more favorable prognosis,” Dr. Jankovic said.

Why, they don’t know, but Parkinson’s has been defying science for decades. But that may soon change.

In The Woodlands at a medical named Power3, researchers believe they have found the protein markers that identify someone with Parkinson’s.

“We’re eight to 10 months away from being able to launch this as a home brew test,” CEO Steve Rash said.

In theory, doctors would be able to send a blood sample to Power3 where they would compare its protein with a normal protein.

“The red is one patient; the green is another,” Ira Goldknaupf said. And they should overlap if they’re normal, but these don’t.

The two red spots on the bottom and three green ones across the top don’t overlap at all. One of the two has Parkinson’s.

And while it looks simple, in Goldknaupf’s 30 years researching proteins, there have been far more failures than successes.

“They’ve had problems with reproducibility, problems finding the same proteins over and over again,” Goldknaupf said.

Rash is cautious but optimistic.

“It could be a paradigm changing event for medical science and for this disease in particular,” Rash said.

The significance is this: There are 17,000 people in Houston who’ve been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, but there are tens of thousands more who have it but don’t know it. That’s because the symptoms don’t begin to appear until you’ve already lost 50 percent to 80 percent of your capacity to produce dopamine.

This isn’t going to bring life again to Muhammad Ali’s frozen face nor calm the neurons that dance inside Michael J. fox.  

But it could save their children or yours, if you’re one of the 30 percent who inherited the disease and might pass it on.

The protein markers would enable you to test your children and get them on medications that appear to slow the progression of the disease.

It’s now 3:30. The deadline is 5 p.m. My right hand is just beginning to shake. By five, it’ll be flopping like a fish. The reality is coming home just as it did for Ken Rogers.   

“I’ve accepted the fact that I can’t write anymore,” Rogers said.

Doctors can’t tell you if you’ve got five good years left, or eight years, or 10.

It’s been six years since I was diagnosed, and it doesn’t take a doctor to know that when you’re hands are shaking, your vision doubled, and you’re speech is slurred that you can’t continue to ignore the obvious.

Your time is running out.

Dan Lauck leaves 11 News after 13 years as a reporter.