Michael J. Fox opens up about new health woes

Actor Michael J. Fox has opened up about a new spinal cord problem he is facing in addition to his ongoing battle with Parkinsons disease.

In 1991, the then 29-year-old Fox received the news that he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. The "Back to the Future" star went on to share his diagnosis with the public seven years later.

In an interview with The New York Times, the actor, 57, spoke about the spinal surgery, unrelated to his Parkinson's disease, he underwent last April, reports foxnews.com.

"I was having this recurring problem with my spinal cord," he said.

Fox added: "I was told it was benign but if it stayed static I would have diminished feeling in my legs and difficulty moving. Then all of a sudden I started falling, a lot. It was getting ridiculous. I was trying to parse what was the Parkinson's and what was the spinal thing. But it came to the point where it was probably necessary to have surgery. So I had surgery, and an intense amount of physical therapy after. I did it all, and eventually people asked me to do some acting."

However, Fox revealed that when he was supposed to return to work in August, he suffered another fall.

"I woke up, walked into the kitchen to get breakfast, mis-stepped and I went down," he recalled.

"I fractured the hell out of my arm. I ended up getting 19 pins and a plate. It was such a blow."

Following the incident, Fox said he dealt with it by trying "not to get too New Age-y", reports foxnews.com.

"I don't talk about things being 'for a reason,'" he noted.

"But I do think the more unexpected something is, the more there is to learn from it. In my case, what was it that made me skip down the hallway to the kitchen thinking I was fine when I'd been in a wheelchair six months earlier? It's because I had certain optimistic expectations of myself, and I'd had results to bear out those expectations, but I'd had failures too. And I hadn't given the failures equal weight."

As for finding a cure for Parkinson's, Fox, who started the Michael J. Fox Foundation in 2000, says he still believes in one.

--IANS

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