Welcome to the ever surprising Parkinson's disease world!
by Carol Meenen

Basically, I consider myself to be shy but, with a sentence for life with PD, I do not have time to be shy. Time is wasting and we need help fast. There are so many people diagnosed with PD each year that it is astounding. Age has no preference. Whether you are young, old, middle aged, or even teenagers, it makes no difference. They are diagnosed with this relentless disease. I decided when I was diagnosed with this illness that I would make the best of it and try to do things for the good of us all. So here I am trying to raise funds for research to help find a cure. I remember that day like it was yesterday. My Mother was with me and we both cried, and I asked why me and my doctor said why not you? Immediately I decided to do something positive to hopefully generate funding for this research to help find the cause and cure for this miserable illness. So this is how it all transpired.

I attend at least one or more PD events a month. I have met so many wonderful folks who deal with this disease daily, and we all want to improve our quality of life. So I pondered how do I do this. I decided to use my creative ability and write poetry about my friends. One of my first poems was about a friend who was chastised abusively by her Mother. This had deeply affected her life and on the occasion of her moving to another state, I wrote a poem to reassure her we were friends for life.

After I realized what these poems meant to everyone, I continued with my therapeutic writing. That sounds like a good name for it. It not only helped me, but it was comforting to them . Some would ask me to write them a poem about their life, and I would interview them to obtain more personal information pertaining to their lives. This way I could include the names of their children, parents, favorite pets, etc. and make it more personalized.

We plan to donate a generous portion of funds that we collect from the sell of our products. Our intent is to sell a CD for PD -- Songs of Love and Hope. The songs were created from poetry written by me, and Andre Clark composed the awesome music of ACP Sounds. We are trying to use our talents to bring in a considerable amount of funds, and a portion of these funds will be used for Parkinson's disease research to help find a cure. We hope you will help us in our endeavor.

E-mail: info@acpsounds.org