A book for all reasons
In previous posts I have mentioned, here and there, books and people who or which have had a profound impact on me – in general and more specifically since being diagnosed with MS. In a couple of these posts I mentioned that in February 2009, some two months after being diagnosed with MS (which instantly gave me an explanation for events of the previous 16 or 17 years), I attended a live-in 5 day MS residential run at the Gawler Foundation in the natural Australian bushland about and hour and a half’s drive outside Melbourne. That course was facilitated and run by Dr Ian Gawler (the Nelson Mandala of cancer in my opinion) – and by Professor George Jelinek.
Professor Jelinek has recently had a revised and updated version of his book (the book that I read) published by Allen & Unwin … here’s a link to the book.
Apart from having MS, and from having his mother suicide from advanced MS, George is both a practising medical specialist and an academic in a specialist field of medicine. If good can come out of bad (and note, this is a philosophy of mine – it does) George getting MS has been a great benefit to the rest of us. Because of the harrowing nature of his mother’s debilitation and demise – and George’s involvement as the then medical student in the family – when he was diagnosed with MS he was hit with a tsunami of emotions, but rather than being overwhelmed he had the personal drive, AND the professional expertise, to drill down and research all there was to know about MS .. and in the subsequent 12 years he has continued to do so, culminating (for the moment at least) in the book.
To follow George’s book is a major lifestyle change. But it works! It is in my opinion the most superlative book in the world, to date, on MS and how to overcome its effects. I could not recommend it highly enough.
Best wishes, KB
vale Jimmie Heuga
When I was diagnosed with MS after years of wrong diagnoses, I did as I always do with a problem – I gathered as much information as I could and proceeded to sort wheat from chaff. Naturally in this day and age the internet and meta-search engines, particularly Google, threw up a great morass of (potentially) useful information – and many gems. It also enabled me to read about some interesting people who have made a difference in the lives of others with MS. One of them was a guy named Jimmie Heuga of Vail Colorado, a famous skier and the son of a Basque* immigrant to the USA.
I found Jimmie Heuga inspirational in several ways. The first was simply that he was a fine athlete – being the first American to win a medal at a Winter Olympics (that was in 1964, along with his friend Billy Kidd who won the silver at the time. Jimmie incidentally won the bronze). Secondly and, importantly, he continued to compete after being diagnosed with relapsing remitting MS in 1970. The third thing I found inspirational about Jimmie Heuga was that in 1984 he set up the (then) eponymous Jimmie Heuga MS Center – now the Can Do MS Center – which from its outset advocated healthy lifestyle choices such as diet and exercise, and promoted the benefits of a healthy mindset. Jimmie’s purpose was to enable people with MS to live their lives fully, passionately and indeed with a sense of fun (in that regard I see similarities to the Gawler Foundation in Australia, though the latter goes further with meditation). And fourthly in setting up the “centre” (as I would spell it) Jimmie Heuga deliberately sought to “challenge medical opinions at the time on how to treat the disease”. While – no disrespect intended – there’s not a great deal that conventional medicine can do now for MS, medicine offered far less in 1984.
Jimmie Heuga died last week, aged 64, just as the Winter Olympics were about to begin again. My enquiries with a journalist lead me to believe he died of complications from MS, but I’m otherwise unable to verify that. The MS community around the world lost, by all accounts, a noble man and a progressive thinker. I’ll mark the occasion with a poem by D H Lawrence, the famous English novelist not generally known for his poetry. From what I’ve read about Jimmie Heuga I have a hunch he’d agree with the sentiment. Best wishes, to you the reader – and vale (goodbye) the man from Vail (Colorado).
Self-Pity
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
D H Lawrence
ps: Incidentally I’m fascinated by the Basques*. Their language, like that of the ancient Etruscans, is unique and unrelated to any of the world’s four main language families – having “no demonstrable kinship with any other speech on earth” (Simeon Potter, 1960) – and accordingly it’s a mystery from where exactly the Basques came. Furthermore it’s generally accepted that the Basques played an important role in the cod trade and were fishing off North America long before the time of Columbus – see eg author Mark Kurlansky’s excellent book Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World … but I digress of course. 