Legs giving way...

Hi all, my dad is suffering with psp. Lots of falls or near falls but twice now he says his legs have just given way. Standing one minute, legs gone from underneath him the next. This is new to him. Anyone else experience this?

[Brenive]

This is also happening to my husband over the last few weeks , just as you described, other wise he copes ok.also his speech is getting more difficult to understand...xxx.Brenda.

[Hidden in reply to Brenive]

Is it another symptom then, do you think? My dad's speech comes and goes.x

[Ratcliffe]

David went through this stage, for many people it stays at this stage for a while, but David passed through it very quickly. He only had a couple of episodes the most notable was in Tesco where he was really struggling to walk and sudenly he just said "I'm going" and started to sag. I managed to catch him and hold him up and a very alert member of the Tesco staff saw and brought over one of the till chairs, and then fetched a wheelchair so that I could get David back to the car. One thing I noticed was that David was talking very slow short steps that day, something that I don't think he ever did before or after, while he could still walk so this might have been what in future we'd know as one of the bad days.

It is a stage of the illness that I've seen reported before, just be ready with chairs when possible!

The speech will get more quieter and difficult to understand as PSP progresses, again some people have reported that it comes and goes, in Davids case it just faded away over time, and other than very occasional words when he got angry or frustrated and really forced one out, it never came back in his case.

Unfortunately, this is one of those illnesses where you have to be ready for anything! It certainly hits people in different ways although the overall symptoms will be almost the same.

[Hidden]

Thankyou so much for such an informative reply.x