Books & me – an intro
It seems to me that to ponder the books one likes is a form of intimate personal introspection – a variant of “the eyes being the windows to the soul”. So I’ll try to not be too introspective, and will stick to books with an MS focus. I’ll give enough away however to say that the first book which really hit me was James A Michener’s “The Drifters” and its immediate effect, on my fertile 17yo brain, was to embrace the life-road ahead which then dauntingly faced me, including the prospect of leaving my hometown to go out into the world alone. If I may continue to digress, this was at a time I was absent from my last few weeks of boarding school with a double-whammy of glandular fever and viral meningitis (something which indeed might be relevant to the upload of MS years later – a theory I might develop further at some stage).
Fast-forward 3 decades and I’ve found myself diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I “research” – that’s something, inter alia, I like to think I’m good at – so I embarked on using every available resource (particularly the internet, libraries, and anecdotal discussions) to find books most likely for me to debunk or dent any notion that this condition is either “incurable” (optimistically) or is “downwardly progressive” (realistically, in my view – in that I can and do believe I can stop this feature of my personal variant of MS). Indexes and footnotes in books in the libraries and in books I bought – and I bought and read many – led to other books and leads, as did innumerable searches of the internet. I view any good research as a pyramid, and the base is always prosaically just a foundation with much ultimately destined to play no further useful role in the collection of wisdom. In that regard I found far too many books were only descriptive telling me what MS was, and others had too great a medical focus. As I learned more I came to the opinion (or “knowledge” if you’ll forgive that arrogant assessment) that the drugs were overrated – that, well-meaning or not, the pharmaceutical approach could at best provide me with only a handbrake to slow the runaway car … leaving 70% (at the very least!) of how I would handle MS something left solely up to me.
It was that issue that then came into focus for me – ie how would I, this little black duck, learn and deal with something that might otherwise deleteriously affect my life, physically and perhaps even mentally.
Yet I’ve gone too far into the mental element already today … this conversation is about books!! … so forgive me, I’ll come back to the mental equation at a later date. Suffice to say that after reading many many books which imparted little useful information beyond describing what I could learn directly from my neurologist, I began to see a genre of books that offered hope and a pattern for stopping or reversing any downward slide. The first of these I stumbled upon was the UK’s Judy Graham’s “Multiple Sclerosis: A Self-Help Guide to Its Management” … and the next was the equally excellent USA published “The MS Recovery Diet” by Ann Sawyer and Judith Bachrach.
But, with no disrespect to those wonderful books, a true gem I found – which I recall happened when I was following a lead on Roger Swank – was a book by a Western Australian medical specialist, Professor George Jelinek. It was at the time titled “Taking Control of Multiple Sclerosis” but is now released in an expanded, updated, version under the title “Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis”. It was, along the lines of Ms Graham’s “management” and Ms Sawyer/Bachrach’s “recovery” book, a book fundamentally intended to provide hope based on fact … and, like those books, it achieves exactly that. I would encourage anyone, anywhere with MS, to read that book in particular. Here is a youtube video of George Jelinek discussing the revised version of that book.
I’ll wind up today’s jottings with a recommendation of good book from left field. It’s not about MS and is called “Learning to Fall – the blessings of an imperfect life” by Philip Simmonds, a college English professor in the US. The author writes about his Motor Neurone Disease (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), something which humbles me. But it’s not a book at its heart about disease, even though disease is in the background. In essence it’s a book about life (with an occasional poem chucked in … a bonus for me). It starts with the proposition that we’ve all lived long enough to know that life is, at once, both more-than and less-than what we bargained for. Serendipitously the universe gave me this book – my wife saw the “learning to fall” title and thought of me. I’d recommend the book, as (believe me) it’s not hard to warm to the author and his wisdom.
Time defeats me, and I’ll come back to a discussion of books at a later stage. In the meantime enjoy your health – its ingredients in my view for MS are diet, exercise and attitude. Best wishes, KB