Michael J.
Fox has opened up about his battle with Parkinson’s and revealed that the shocking diagnosis made him an alcoholic.
The 61-year-old Hollywood actor was diagnosed with the unforgiving degenerative illness when he was just 29 years old after experiencing symptoms like nervous twitching of his fingers.
While his drinking was already an issue in the years leading to the diagnosis, Michael now admitted that he became an alcoholic after the diagnosis because he drank to “disassociate” and “distract” himself from the inevitable situation.
“I intended to pretend as if this wasn’t happening to me. I drank to disassociate. Tracy got to the end of her rope because now we had twins,” the Doc Hollywood star said in his Apple + documentary Still.
“I drank to distraction, to escape my situation. I was an alcoholic.”
He continued: “There’s so many ways that I could have hurt myself. I could have hit my head. I could have drunk too much at a certain developmental period.”
On top of presenting serious health concerns, the drinking also caused tensions in Fox’s then-fresh marriage to Tracy Pollan.
The actor recently also opened up about his illness in an interview with CBS Sunday Mornings as he told the outlet that he’s bracing for the time the disease comes “banging on the door.”
“Yea, it’s banging on the door. I mean, I’m not going to lie it’s going to hurt,” he said after journalist Jane Pauley asked him about the time Parkinson’s is “going to call” for him.
He also admitted that life was “getting tougher every day” as he was getting older before embracing that there was nothing he could do because “that’s the way it is.”
“You don’t die from Parkinson’s. You die with Parkinson’s. So I’ve been thinking about the mortality of it. I’m not gonna be 80. I’m not gonna be 80,” he added.
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