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. 
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