Sep
9
Two years ago, Cami Walker was, in her words, “coasting along through life” in a high-paying, fast-track job at a San Francisco advertising agency, and in a brand new marriage. Then, two weeks after returning home from her honeymoon, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. “You don’t expect, when you take the vows ‘in sickness and in health,’ that sickness is going to start two weeks later,” she says. “You kind of picture yourself old and gray and in rockers on the porch before that happens.”
Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease with no known cure that affects the brain and spinal cord. It isn’t fatal, but it can result in serious physical and cognitive disabilities, depending upon the form it takes. After being diagnosed, Walker soon no longer had the strength to continue working.
She and her husband, an actor, moved to Los Angeles so that he could find work to support both of them. The strain of her health problems and the stress of the move sent her into a period of deep despair. In March, she decided to perform a simple ritual suggested by one of her spiritual teachers, a South African medicine woman named Mbali Creazzo.
The idea was to take her mind off her disease by focusing on helping others and giving something away each day for 29 days in a row. She found that the ritual not only made her feel better by giving her something else to think about; she believes it also lessened her symptoms from the disease and even helped deepen her relationship with her husband.
Read the rest: A woman with MS is helped by giving 29 gifts in 29 days
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