Sep
9
A woman with MS is helped by giving 29 gifts in 29 days
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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.
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Sep
1
Multiple sclerosis: the eloquent rage of a party girl cut down - Telegraph
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There’s an itch on Collette Waller’s face that she badly wants to scratch. She raises a pale, uncertain hand, wafting it about until it finds the right spot. Once, twice, it misses. She persists. Any of us sitting with her would help, but that’s not what she wants. She won’t even ask. Her power of movement is getting more limited by the day, but she’ll be damned if she’ll surrender the last vestiges of independence.
Not so long ago, she could still drink tea from a mug by herself - if she concentrated very hard. She wrote a poem about it: the ludicrous effort of co-ordinating brain and hands when your nerves have gone, the precision placing of the handle, the monkey lips pursed to reach the rim of the mug without spilling, the fury of knowing that “a poxy child’s beaker” with a lid would make things easier.
Collette is 36 and has a particularly aggressive form of multiple sclerosis. She was a tireless party girl, a brilliant county netball player, a traveller, someone who knitted her family together. Now she is sitting in a wheelchair while a carer brushes her eyelids mauve and applies mascara. On the table beside her is the thing she refused for so long: a mug of tea with a straw that someone has to lift every time she wants to drink. There is also her book of poems - angry, fast and full of strong language, shouting truths about disability that most people would rather not hear.
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Jul
26
BBC NEWS | Rowling’s Harry Potter ‘regret’
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Best-selling author JK Rowling has spoken of her regret that she never told her mother about her world-famous creation, Harry Potter.
She began work on her tales of the apprentice wizard six months before her mother Anne, who had multiple sclerosis, died at the age of 45.
Rowling’s comments came in a BBC Scotland programme about the degenerative disease.
The writer expressed frustration about a lack of funding for MS research.
Recalling her mother, the Edinburgh-based author said: “I started writing Harry six months before she died. That’s obviously a real regret, because I never told her I was even writing it.
“She never knew anything about Harry Potter at all.”
read the rest: BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Rowling’s Harry Potter ‘regret’