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He freezes in doorways. What actually gets him moving?
Freezing of gait in Parkinson’s, and the small physical tricks families use to get through a threshold.
He walks fine across the room and then stops dead at the bathroom door, feet stuck, upper body still going. It looks like hesitation and it is not. The feet have stopped taking instructions.
The thing most families are given is a sheet about visual cues. Here is what people actually do.
Tape across the floor
A strip of bright tape, blue painter’s tape works, laid across the threshold. He steps over it.
"His feet will not start walking but they will step over something." One family has it on four doorways and stopped apologizing for how the house looks.
Two honest notes from people who tried it: it does not work on every doorway, for reasons nobody can explain, and for one family it worked for four months and then stopped completely.
Count out loud, and let him hear you
"One two three and step on three." It has to be out loud, and it has to be you starting it. Counting in your head does nothing.
One family uses a marching rhythm instead, left right left right, because he was in the Navy and it lands somewhere different. Worth an afternoon to find out whether something like that exists for your person.
Stop saying "come on"
This one comes up constantly. "Every single time I said it he locked up harder, and it took me two years to connect those two things."
Urgency makes freezing worse. The instinct to hurry somebody who is stuck is exactly wrong, and almost everybody has to learn it the slow way.
A laser line, if the tape stops working
Canes and walkers exist with a laser that projects a line on the floor a step ahead. Around forty dollars for the add-on version.
The advantage over tape: it moves with him, so there is nothing to get used to and nothing to stop seeing.
Turning in a small space is the hard one
Most people solve the doorway and then get stuck halfway through a turn in the bathroom.
One OT told a family to make the turn a wide arc like a car rather than a pivot on the spot. The caregiver says it out loud every time: "steer it around, big circle." It takes up the whole bathroom and he does not lock up.
Watch when it happens, not just that it happens
"Ours is almost nothing before noon and awful after four, and it took me most of a year to see the pattern. It changed how we schedule everything."
If you are going to write one thing down this week, write down the time of day each freeze happens.
One caregiver spent a year and a half calling it stubbornness before she understood what it was.
If that is where you are, that is where most people start.
Everything here is what worked for people doing this at home. It is not medical advice, and Kind Soup is not a medical or emergency service. If somebody is in danger, contact your local emergency number.
Also on Kind Soup
- Why won’t mom shower?Not the clinical answer. What actually worked for people who fought this every week for years.
- Sundowning: what actually helps at four in the afternoonShe is fine all day. Around four it starts. Here is what caregivers do about the hardest two hours of the day.