Melinda Penkava-Smith punches back against Parkinson's

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“It’s maddening,” Melinda Penkava-Smith says, mostly to herself. The iPad screen keeps moving, changing apps, zooming in, when she doesn’t want it to. She is trying to read an article, trying to scroll down. She supports her finger with her thumb to gain control. Her back is slightly curved over the table; her movements are slow and look painful.

“Magazines are better,” she says.

Melinda is a journalist, adventurer and, I would say, yard artist. Now, at the age of 64, she has a severe form of Parkinson's disease, or PD, a brain disorder that causes unintended or uncontrollable movements and difficulty with balance and coordination, worsening over time. It has no cure. According to the Parkinson’s Foundation, over a million people in the U.S. have PD. Melinda discovered she had PD at age 55.

On a typical day, she wakes up and dozes, and wakes up again at 3 a.m., then flips on BBC.

Melinda’s humor and sarcasm are completely intact, though her voice is a whisper — barely audible.

“Better to hear other people’s problems than my own…but the sleep,” she says. “Some days I fall asleep in my food.”

At 7:30 a.m., she gets out of bed with assistance from Crystal, one of the nurses who help her. Then she showers. On the day of my visit, she has boxing so she will get an 11:45 ride to New Bern. The ride is volunteer help through the Neuse Neighbors Network.


Today, her hands are in fists and her eyes are nearly closed, like she’s drifting to sleep in the middle of our conversation.

I raise my camera.


“You shoot Nikon now. I thought you shot Canon,” she says suddenly. And I did, years ago. She is sharp. Her memory is better than mine. My mother and step-father once lived next door to Melinda and her husband Keith Smith. I have always been in awe of her. Even more so now.

Melinda’s voice was once a comfort on NPR, both as a newscaster and through radio talk shows like Talk of the Nation. Prior to NPR she worked at WUNC-FM in Chapel Hill, and WRAL-FM in Raleigh.

Originally from West Haven, Connecticut, Melinda met her husband, Keith, in Raleigh and came to Pamlico County for the first time in the late ’80s. Eventually they bought a boat and felt the lure of Oriental. They are responsible for the local website, TownDock.net. 

“In 1995, I quit to go cruising. We felt guilty quitting our perfectly good jobs,” she says.

She now realizes how lucky they were to have done that while she could still sail. They lived on “HeatherBell,” a Westsail 28 cutter named after Keith’s grandmother’s house in Scotland.

“I miss keeping up with the town and all that is going on,” she says of Town Dock, which covers Oriental and Keith still maintains.

“We hear stories of people who hold off retirement. I can’t imagine climbing around on a boat right now,” she says.

Except for a ticking clock, the room is silent while she struggles to whisper. She drinks ginger beer with a straw, one can a day. From where she sits, she looks over the duck pond behind the Oriental harbor.

She says the biggest misconception about PD is that everyone has Parkinson's the same way. “If you meet one person with Parkinson’s, you have met one person with Parkinson’s,” she says.

For her, it is more than tremors. There is sleeplessness and fatigue.

“Apathy is also big problem with Parkinson's. I feel like I don’t care about anything,” she says. Apathy toward herself makes it hard to exercise, she says, and exercise is her main medicine.

During the pandemic, she says she “dropped away” from exercise, which made her health fall behind, and Parkinson's took over. She is trying to step it up again.

The volunteer arrives to take her to boxing at Rock Steady Boxing in New Bern, 45 minutes away.

She is helped down the many stairs of their elevated home, past her overgrown garden, and into the car. She says the state of her garden is a heartbreak.

“I have a tipping point,” she says. “My balance is too off. I can’t bend to garden.”

Many years ago, her garden was like a scene from a fairy-tale. Blue bottles hung upside down. And she always had a cool dog in tow named Jack.

I follow them to New Bern, and when I arrive, Melinda and her classmates are putting on boxing gloves and standing, sitting, punching the air or punching dummies with hooks or jabs.

Rock Steady Boxing, supported by the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, is a boxing gym only for people who have PD. They serve young and old, veterans — a wide range of people who have PD.

“Getting started early to stop the progression is key,” says Staci Hulse, a volunteer for the program leading today’s workout. The New Bern program is in its fourth year and is run by Bethany Richards. They have 76 boxers.

“Really, it’s how I get out my frustrations,” Melinda whispers as color, and a smile, return to her face.

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