Michael J. Fox knows a thing or two about resilience after living with Parkinson's Disease for 30 years.
In an interview with Town & Country magazine published Thursday, the "Back to the Future" actor, 62, detailed the injuries he's sustained in recent years, since breaking his upper arm while recovering from a risky spinal surgery to remove a noncancerous tumor in 2018. That fall was Fox's "darkest moment," he told People magazine in 2020.
Yet “that was nothing,” he said of the broken arm, which threatened Fox's pervasive optimism and inspired his 2020 memoir, "No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality." Fox shared that he has broken his other arm and shoulder, smashed his orbital bone and cheek and broken his hand since that injury.
“My hand got infected and then I almost lost it,” he said. “It was a tsunami of misfortune.”
Fox, who takes pills that help him speak by combatting paralysis of his facial muscles, also trains daily to preserve his ambulatory skills, despite the risk of further injuries from daily falls. But he doesn't appear too concerned about it.
“One day I’ll run out of gas,” he said. “One day I’ll just say, ‘It’s not going to happen. I’m not going out today.’ If that comes, I’ll allow myself that. I’m 62 years old.
"Certainly, if I were to pass away tomorrow, it would be premature, but it wouldn’t be unheard of. And so, no, I don’t fear that.”
In the documentary that came out earlier this year, "Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie," Fox frequently falls while walking and incurs multiple injuries over the course of filming.
"People around me are going, 'Be careful, be careful,' " Fox says. "And I'm like: 'This has nothing to do with being careful. This happens.' "
Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson's when he was 29 and publicly shared the news seven years later, in 1998.
The fastest-growing neurodegenerative condition in the U.S., Parkinson’s is an incurable brain disorder, a progressive disease "that causes unintended or uncontrollable movements, such as shaking, stiffness, and difficulty with balance and coordination," according to the National Institute on Aging.
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In 2008, Fox published a book titled "Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist." Ten years later, he started questioning his blind optimism after falling while recovering from surgery.
"I was lying on the floor in my kitchen with a shattered arm waiting for the ambulance to show up," Fox told USA TODAY in 2020. "I kind of went, 'What an idiot. All this time you've been telling everybody to be optimistic, chin-up, and you're miserable now. There's nothing but pain and regret. There's no way to put a shine on this.'"
It's this fall that kicks off Fox's book, "No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality," in which the actor goes on to detail his harrowing recovery from spinal surgery, insights from his battle with Parkinson's disease and his return to positivity after, quite literally, falling into despair.
"That was a real breakthrough moment for me, because I realized that I've been selling that optimism to people for so long," he said. "I believe it's true to my core, but it struck me that at that point I questioned it, and I questioned it really severely. And so the rest of the book is this journey through finding my way back with gratitude. And I think gratitude is what makes optimism sustainable."
Through his recovery, falling and then needing to recover again, Fox said he realized the importance of being realistic while still maintaining optimism.
"I think the first thing you have to do is accept if you're faced with a difficult situation," Fox said. "And once I do that, that doesn't mean I can't ever change it. I can change it, but I have to accept it for what it is first, before I can change it. And I have to be real about it. And once I do that, then it opens all doors."
The Michael J. Fox Foundation has reportedly spent nearly $2 billion in Parkinson's research since being established in 2000. Earlier this year, the nonprofit announced the discovery of "a monumental leap forward for our disease": a spinal fluid test – which is in the clinical trial phase – that can detect early stages of Parkinson’s in a person's cells.
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Contributing: Charles Trepany, USA TODAY
