Shaun Udal avoids emotion as he talks about the news that has changed his life.
'It's not the end of the world yet, it's certainly not a death sentence,' says the former Hampshire, Middlesex and England off-spinner.
'It might take 10 years to kick in properly but it will at some stage be a deterioration and I will have to manage it when it happens.
Shaun Udal had suspected there was something wrong for some time before the diagnosis
Udal, pictured here in 2006 with Andrew Flintoff, received the news on his 50th birthday
'I'm just having to adopt the old sportsman's motto of taking each day as it comes.'
It is Udal's way of dealing with the diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease earlier this year that he made public on Twitter earlier this month.
'My first reaction was very shocked,' Udal confesses. 'How do you react to something like that? You don't know what to do because it's such a bolt from the blue. I'd been so active for 20-odd years playing cricket and was quite a light-hearted character.
'I tried not to be dragged down by the news but it's difficult. You can try not to be down in the dumps but that's easy to say when you're not the one who's actually got it.
'When my mind is distracted I'm fine so that's why I'm trying to keep busy. It's times when I'm in my car driving that my mind will wander a bit. What's going to happen next week? Or the week after? It's the unknown.
'When is it going to kick in and how bad's it going to be? But you can't get too down about it. It's happened and I just have to get on with it.'
Udal may have been shocked at the diagnosis but he was not totally surprised because he had suspected something was wrong with him for some time.
'I had a neck operation about three and a half years ago courtesy of the Professional Cricketers' Association and it was fantastic of them to help out,' he says. 'The vertebrae had basically shattered so they took that out and put a plastic one in but a few weeks after the op I started to develop a shaking in my arm.
The former England off-spinner treats the illess as a sportsman does, one day at a time
'My fingers were very sore, my right hand side was straining a bit and my speech was a little slurred. I was moody and miserable, down in the dumps and just wasn't feeling myself and just didn't feel right. So I went back for more tests.
'They told me it could be the vertebrae pushing on my nervous system making me shake but I knew that wasn't right. Nobody knows your body like you do so I kept pushing and pushing until I had electrolysis treatment to see reaction speeds and all that stuff and the results came back 'in the realms of acceptability' which meant there was something wrong but they didn't know what it was.
'I didn't feel right and in January I was at the office and had a blackout, fell down the stairs and was unconscious for a while. I was found in a mess by one of the staff and was taken to hospital in an ambulance in a neck brace.
'They did a brain scan and six weeks later I got the results saying there were signs of Parkinson's. They came in the post.'
The news came as Udal was celebrating his 50th birthday and, with the cruellest of ironies, at a time when life had been looking up after what he admits was a difficult transition from playing 'to the real world'.
'I had a tough time for a couple of years after I retired, emotionally, physically, mentally,' he says. 'The transition was hard and because I'd played so long it was even harder.
'I invested in my business while I was still playing so I knew I'd have something to do but it was still the shock of no dressing room, no lads' nights out, no
