Patrick Morrissey didn’t let Parkinson’s disease stop him from rowing across the Pacific Ocean

Patrick Morrissey had never rowed a day in his life when he decided to embark on a journey across the Pacific Ocean and raise money for the Michael J. Fox Foundation.

Patrick Morrissey had never rowed a day in his life when he decided to take part in a 41-day journey to traverse 2,800 miles across the Pacific Ocean in a boat powered only by human muscles. Living with Parkinson’s disease, he’s used to having moments that challenge him, but he’ll be the first to say he brought this particular one upon himself. To understand exactly how Morrissey, a 53-year-old father of two and now the first person with Parkinson’s to row across the Pacific, ended up at the center of a story that has all the makings of those live-action Disney movies that remind us how incredible human beings can be, we have to go back to 2019, when it started with a tremor. Well, if Morrissey’s being honest, it started a little before that. Something had been “off” — be it his balance or brain fog — for a while. He knew he couldn’t shrug off the tremor as a simple symptom of aging, however, and in late 2019, a doctor at the Mayo Clinic told him three words that carry a collective weight that those in healthy bodies can never fully understand: Parkinson’s, incurable, progressive. “I was in a little bit of a dark space trying to get a grip around what that meant to me,” Morrissey remembered in a recent interview with CNN, 12 days after he had set foot back on land, immediately digging into a meal of BBQ chicken and ribs, his first non-freeze dried food since setting forth on their adventure on June 8. His diagnosis came just before the coronavirus pandemic forced the global population indoors, which helped Morrissey keep his situation private.