On Being a Cripple -By Nancy Mairs
The other day I was thinking of writing an essay on being a cripple. I
was thinking hard in one of the stalls of the womenʼs room in my
office building, as I was shoving my shirt into my jeans and tugging
up my zipper. Preoccupied, I flushed, picked up my book bag, took
my cane down from the hook, and unlatched the door. So many
movements unbalanced me, and as I pulled the door open I fell over
backward, landing fully clothed on the toilet seat with my legs splayed
in front of me: the old beetle-on-its-back routine. Saturday afternoon,
the building deserted, I was free to laugh aloud as I wriggled back to
my feet, my voice bouncing off the yellowish tiles from all directions.
Had anyone been there with me, Iʼd have been still and faint and hot
with chagrin. I decided that it was high time to write the essay.
First, the matter of semantics. I am a cripple. I choose this word to
name me. I choose from among several possibilities, the most
common of which are “handicapped” and “disabled.” I made the
choice a number of years ago, without thinking, unaware of my
motives for doing so. Even now, Iʼm not sure what those motives are,
but I recognize that they are complex and not entirely flattering.
People—crippled or not—wince at the word “cripple,” as they do not
at “handicapped” or “disabled.” Perhaps I want them to wince. I want
them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates /gods
/viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her
existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger.
But, to be fair to myself, a certain amount of honesty underlies my
choice. “Cripple” seems to me a clean word, straightforward and
precise. It has an honorable history, having made its first appearance
in the Lindisfarne Gospel in the tenth century. As a lover of words, I
like the accuracy with which it describes my condition: I have lost the
full use of my limbs. “Disabled,” by contrast, suggests any incapacity,
physical or mental. And I certainly donʼt like “handicapped,” which
implies that I have deliberately been put at a disadvantage, by whom
I canʼt imagine (my God is not a Handicapper General), in order to
equalize chances in the great race of life. These words seem to me to
be moving away from my condition, to be widening the gap between
word and reality. Most remote is the recently coined euphemism
“differently abled,” which partakes of the same semantic hopefulness
that transformed countries from “undeveloped” to “underdeveloped,”
then to “less developed,” and finally to “developing” nations. People
have continued to starve in those countries during the shift. Some
realities do not obey the dictates of language.
Mine is one of them. Whatever you call me, I remain crippled. But I
donʼt care what you call me, so long as it isnʼt “differently abled,”
which strikes me as pure verbal garbage designed, by its ability to
describe anyone, to describe no one. I subscribe to George Orwellʼs
thesis that “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to
have foolish thoughts.” And I refuse to participate in the degeneration
of the language to the extent that I deny that I have lost anything in
the course of this calamitous disease; I refuse to pretend that the only
differences between you and me are the various ordinary ones that
distinguish any one person from another. But call me “disabled” or
“handicapped” if you like. I have long since grown accustomed to
them; and if they are vague, at least they hint at the truth. Moreover, I
use them myself. Society is no readier to accept crippledness than to
accept death, war, sex, sweat, or wrinkles. I would never refer to
another person as a cripple. It is the word I use to name only myself.
I havenʼt always been crippled, a fact for which I am soundly grateful.
To be whole of limb is, I know from experience, infinitely more
pleasant and useful than to be crippled; and if that knowledge leaves
me open to bitterness at MY loss, the physical soundness I once
enjoyed (though I did not enjoy it half enough) is well worth the
occasional stab of regret. Though never any good at sports, I was a
normally active child and young adult. I climbed trees, played
hopscotch, jumped rope, skated, swam, rode my bicycle, sailed. I
despised team sports, spending some of the wretchedest afternoons
of my life, sweaty and humiliated, behind a field-hockey stick and
under a basketball hoop. I tramped alone for miles along the bridle
paths that webbed the woods behind the house I grew up in. I
swayed through countless dim hours in the arms of one man or
another under the scattered shot of light from mirrored balls, and
gyrated through countless more as Tab Hunter and Johnny Mathis
gave way to the Rolling Stones, Credence Clearwater Revival,
Cream. I walked down the aisle. I pushed baby carriages, changed
tires in the rain, marched for peace.
When I was twenty-eight I started to trip and drop things. What at first
seemed my natural clumsiness soon became too pronounced to
shrug off. I consulted a neurologist, who told me that I had a brain
tumor. A battery of tests, increasingly disagreeable, revealed no
tumor. About a year and a half later I developed a blurred spot in one
eye. I had, at last, the episodes “disseminated in space and time”
requisite for a diagnosis: multiple sclerosis. I have never been sorry
for the doctorʼs initial misdiagnosis, however. For almost a week, until
the negative results of the tests were in, I thought that I was going to
die right away. Every day for the past nearly ten years, then, has
been a kind of gift. I accept all gifts.
Multiple sclerosis is a chronic degenerative disease of the central
nervous system, in which the myelin that sheathes the nerves is
somehow eaten away and sear tissue forms in its place, interrupting
the nervesʼ signals. During its course, which is unpredictable and
uncontrollable, one may lose vision, hearing, speech, the ability to
walk, control of bladder and/or bowels, strength in any or all
extremities, sensitivity to touch, vibration, and/or pain, potency,
coordination of movements— the list of possibilities is lengthy and,
yes, horrifying. One may also lose oneʼs sense of humor. Thatʼs the
easiest to lose and the hardest to survive without.
In the past ten years, I have sustained some of these losses.
Characteristic of MS are sudden attacks, called exacerbations,
followed by remissions, and these I have not had. Instead, my
disease has been slowly progressive. My left leg is now so weak that
I walk with the aid of a brace and a cane; and for distances I use an
Amigo, a variation on the electric wheelchair that looks rather like an
electrified kiddie car. I no longer have much use of my left hand. Now
my right side is weakening as well. I still have the blurred spot in my
right eye. Overall, though, Iʼve been lucky so far. My world has, of
necessity, been circumscribed by my losses, but the terrain left me
has been ample enough for me to continue many of the activities that
absorb me: writing, teaching, raising children and cats and plants and
snakes, reading, speaking publicly about MS and depression, even
playing bridge with people patient and honorable enough to let me
scatter cards every which way without sneaking a peek.
Lest I begin to sound like Pollyanna, however, let me say that I donʼt
like having MS. I hate it. My life holds realities—harsh ones, some of
them—that no right-minded human being ought to accept without
grumbling. One of them is fatigue. I know of no one with MS who
does not complain of bone-weariness; in a disease that presents an
astonishing variety of symptoms, fatigue seems to be a common
factor. I wake up in the morning feeling the way most people do at the
end of a bad day, and I take it from there. As a result, I spend a lot of
time in extremis and, impatient with limitation, I tend to ignore my
fatigue until my body breaks down in some way and forces rest. Then
I miss picnics, dinner parties, poetry readings, the brief visits of old
friends from out of town. The offspring of a puritanical tradition of
exceptional venerability, I cannot view these lapses without shame.
My life often seems a series of small failures to do as I ought.
I lead, on the whole, an ordinary life, probably rather like the one I
would have led had I not had MS. I am lucky that my predilections
were already solitary, sedentary, and bookish—unlike the world-
famous French cellist I have read about, or the young woman I talked
with one long afternoon who wanted only to be a jockey. I had just
begun graduate school when I found out something was wrong with
me, and I have remained, interminably, a graduate student. Perhaps I
would not have if Iʼd thought I had the stamina to return to a full-time
job as a technical editor; but Iʼve enjoyed my studies.
In addition to studying, I teach writing courses. I also teach medical
students how to give neurological examinations. I pick up freelance
editing jobs here and there. I have raised a foster son and sent him
into the world, where he has made me two grandbabies, and I am still
escorting my daughter and son through adolescence. I go to Mass
every Saturday. I am a superb, if messy, cook. I am also an
enthusiastic laundress, capable of sorting a hamper full of clothes into
five subtly differentiated piles, but a terrible housekeeper. I can do
italic writing and, in an emergency, bathe an oil-soaked cat. I play a
fiendish game of Scrabble. When I have the time and the money, I
like to sit on my front steps with my husband, drinking Amaretto and
smoking a cigar, as we imagine our counterparts in Leningrad and
make sure that the sun gets down once more behind the sharp
childish scrawl of the Tucson Mountains.
This lively plenty has its bleak complement, of course, in all the things
I can no longer do. I will never run again, except in dreams, and one
day I may have to write that I will never walk again. I like to go
camping, but I canʼt follow George and the children along the trails
that wander out of a campsite through the desert or into the
mountains. In fact, even on the level Iʼve learned never to check the
weather or try to hold a coherent conversation: I need all my attention
for my wayward feet. Of late, I have begun to catch myself wondering
how people can propel themselves without canes. With only one
usable hand, I have to select my clothing with care not so much for
style as for ease of ingress and egress, and even so, dressing can be
laborious. I can no longer do fine stitchery, pick up babies, play the
piano, braid my hair. I am immobilized by acute attacks of
depression, which may or may not be physiologically related to MS
but are certainly its logical concomitant.
These two elements, the plenty and the privation, are never pure, nor
are the delight and wretchedness that accompany them. Almost
every pickle that I get into as a result of my weakness and
clumsiness—and I get into plenty—is funny as well as maddening
and sometimes painful. I recall one May afternoon when a friend and
I were going out for a drink after finishing up at school. As we were
climbing into opposite sides of my car, chatting, I tripped and fell, flat
and hard, onto the asphalt parking lot, my abrupt departure
interrupting him in mid-sentence. “Whereʼd you go?” he called as he
came around the back of the car to find me hauling myself up by the
door frame. “Are you all right?” Yes, I told him, I was fine, just a bit
rattly, and we drove off to find a shady patio and some beer. When I
got home an hour or so later, my daughter greeted me with “What
have you done to yourself?” I looked down. One elbow of my white
turtleneck with the green froggies, one knee of my white trousers, one
white kneesock were blood-soaked. We peeled off the clothes and
inspected the damage, which was nasty enough but not alarming.
That part wasnʼt funny: The abrasions took a long time to heal, and
one got a little infected. Even so, when I think of my friend talking
earnestly, suddenly, to the hot thin air while I dropped from his view
as though through a trap door, I find the image as silly as something
from a Marx Brothers movie.
I may find it easier than other cripples to amuse myself because I live
propped by the acceptance and the assistance and, sometimes, the
amusement of those around me. Grocery clerks tear my checks out of
my checkbook for me, and sales clerks find chairs to put into dressing
rooms when I want to try on clothes. The people I work with make
sure I teach at times when I am least likely to be fatigued, in places I
can get to, with the materials I need. My students, with one
anonymous exception (in an end-of-the-semester evaluation), have
been unperturbed by my disability. Some even like it. One was
immensely cheered by the information that I paint my own fingernails;
she decided, she told me, that if I could go to such trouble over fine
details, she could keep on writing essays. I suppose I became some
sort of bright-fingered muse. She wrote good essays, too.
The most important struts in the framework of my existence, of
course, are my husband and children. Dismayingly few marriages
survive the MS test, and why should they? Most twenty-two- and
nine-teen-year-olds, like George and me, can vow in clear
conscience, after a childhood of chicken pox and summer colds, to
keep one another in sickness and in health so long as they both shall
live. Not many are equipped for catastrophe: the dismay, the
depression, the extra work, the boredom that a degenerative disease
can insinuate into a relationship. And our society, with its emphasis
on fun and its association of fun with physical performance, offers
little encouragement for a whole spouse to stay with a crippled
partner. Children experience similar stresses when faced with a
crippled parent, and they are more helpless, since parents and
children canʼt usually get divorced. They hate, of course, to be
different from their peers, and the child whose mother is tacking down
the aisle of a school auditorium packed with proud parents like a
Cape Cod dinghy in a stiff breeze jolly well stands out in a crowd.
Deprived of legal divorce, the child can at least deny the motherʼs
disability, even her existence, forgetting to tell her about recitals and
PTA meetings, refusing to accompany her to stores or church or the
movies, never inviting friends to the house. Many do.
But Iʼve been limping along for ten years now, and so far George and
the children are still at my left elbow, holding tight. Anne and Matthew
vacuum floors and dust furniture and haul trash and rake up dog
droppings and button my cuffs and bake lasagna and Toll House
cookies with just enough grumbling so I know that they donʼt have
brain fever. And far from hiding me, theyʼre forever dragging me by
racks of fancy clothes or through teeming school corridors, or
welcoming gaggles of friends while Iʼm wandering through the house
in Anneʼs filmy pink babydoll pajamas. George generally calls before
he brings someone home, but he does just as many dumb thankless
chores as the children. And they all yell at me, laugh at some of my
jokes, write me funny letters when weʼre apart-in short, treat me as an
ordinary human being for whom they have some use. I think they like
me. Unless theyʼre faking….
Faking. Thereʼs the rub. Tugging at the fringes of my consciousness
always is the terror that people are kind to me only because Iʼm a
cripple. My mother almost shattered me once, with that instinct
mothers have—blind, I think, in this case, but unerring nonetheless—
for striking blows along the fault-lines of their childrenʼs hearts, by
telling me, in an attack on my selfishness, “We all have to make
allowances for you, of course, because of the way you are.” From the
distance of a couple of years, I have to admit that I havenʼt any idea
just what she meant, and Iʼm not sure that she knew either. She was
awfully angry. But at the time, as the words thudded home, I felt my
worst fear, suddenly realized. I could bear being called selfish: I am.
But I couldnʼt bear the corroboration that those around me were doing
in fact what Iʼd always suspected them of doing, professing fondness
while silently putting up with me because of the way I am. A cripple.
Iʼve been a little cracked ever since.
Along with this fear that people are secretly accepting shoddy goods
comes a relentless pressure to please—to prove myself worth the
burdens I impose, I guess, or to build a substantial account of
goodwill against which I may write drafts in times of need. Part of the
pressure arises from social expectations. In our society, anyone who
deviates from the norm had better find some way to compensate.
Like fat people, who are expected to be jolly, cripples must bear their
lot meekly and cheerfully. A grumpy cripple isnʼt playing by the rules.
And much of the pressure is self-generated. Early on I vowed that, if I
had to have MS, by God I was going to do it well. This is a class act,
ladies and gentlemen. No tears, no recriminations, no faint-
heartedness.
One way and another, then, I wind up feeling like Tiny Tim, peering
over the edge of the table at the Christmas goose, waving my crutch,
piping down Godʼs blessing on us all. Only sometimes I donʼt want to
play Tiny Tim. Iʼd rather be Caliban, a most scurvy monster.
Fortunately, at home no one much cares whether Iʼm a good cripple
or a bad cripple as long as I make vichyssoise with fair regularity.
One evening several years ago, Anne was reading at the dining-room
table while I cooked dinner. As I opened a can of tomatoes, the can
slipped in my left hand and juice spattered me and the counter with
bloody spots. Fatigued and infuriated, I bellowed, “Iʼm so sick of being
crippled!” Anne glanced at me over the top of her book. “There now,”
she said, “do you feel better?” “Yes,” I said, “yes, I do.” She went
back to her reading. I felt better. Thatʼs about all the attention my
scurviness ever gets.
Because I hate being crippled, I sometimes hate myself for being a
cripple. Over the years I have come to expect—even accept—attacks
of violent self-loathing. Luckily, in general our society no longer
connects deformity and disease directly with evil (though a
charismatic once told me that I have MS because a devil is in me)
and so Iʼm allowed to move largely at will, even among small children.
But Iʼm not sure that this revision of attitude has been particularly
helpful. Physical imperfection, even freed of moral disapprobation,
still defies and violates the ideal, especially for women, whose
confinement in their bodies as objects of desire is far from over. Each
age, of course, has its ideal, and I doubt that ours is any better or
worse than any other. Todayʼs ideal woman, who lives on the glossy
pages of dozens of magazines, seems to be between the ages of
eighteen and twenty-five; her hair has body, her teeth flash white, her
breath smells minty, her underarms are dry; she has a career but is
still a fabulous cook, especially of meals that take less than twenty
minutes to prepare; she does not ordinarily appear to have a husband
or children; she is trim and deeply tanned; she jogs, swims, plays
tennis, rides a bicycle, sails, but does not bowl; she travels widely,
even to out-of-the-way places like Finland and Samoa, always in the
company of the ideal man, who possesses a nearly identical set of
characteristics. There are a few exceptions. Though usually white
and often blonde, she may be black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native
American, so long as she is unusually sleek. She may be old,
provided she is selling a laxative or is Lauren Bacall. If she is selling a
detergent, she may be married and have a flock of strikingly messy
children. But she is never a cripple.
Like many women I know, I have always had an uneasy relationship
with my body. I was not a popular child, largely, I think now, because
I was peculiar: intelligent, intense, moody, shy, given to unexpected
actions and inexplicable notions and emotions. But as I entered
adolescence, I believed myself unpopular because I was homely: my
breasts too flat, my mouth too wide, my hips too narrow, my clothing
never quite right in fit or style. I was not, in fact, particularly ugly, old
photographs inform me, though I was well off the ideal; but I carried
this sense of self-alienation with me into adulthood, where it
regenerated in response to the depredations of MS. Even with my
brace I walk with a limp so pronounced that, seeing myself on the
videotape of a television program on the disabled, I couldnʼt believe
that anything but an inchworm could make progress humping along
like that. My shoulders droop and my pelvis thrusts forward as I try to
balance myself upright, throwing my frame into a bony S. As a result
of contractures, one shoulder is higher that the other and I carry one
arm bent in front of me, the fingers curled into a claw. My left arm and
leg have wasted into pipe-stems, and I try always to keep them
covered. When I think about how my body must look to others,
especially to men, to whom I have been trained to display myself, I
feel ludicrous, even loathsome.
At my age, however, I donʼt spend much time thinking about my
appearance. The burning egocentricity of adolescence, which
assures one that all the world is looking all the time, has passed,
thank God, and Iʼm generally too caught up in what Iʼm doing to step
back, as I used to, and watch myself as though upon a stage. Iʼm also
too old to believe in the accuracy of self-image. I know that Iʼm not a
hideous crone, that in fact, when Iʼm rested, well dressed, and well
made up, I look fine. The self-loathing I feel is neither physically nor
intellectually substantial. What I hate is not me but a disease.
I am not a disease.
And a disease is not—at least not single-handedly—going to
determine who I am, though at first it seemed to be going to.
Adjusting to a chronic incurable illness, I have moved through a
process similar to that outlined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in On Death
and Dying. The major difference—and it is far more significant than
most people recognize—is that I canʼt be sure of the outcome, as the
terminally ill cancer patient can. Research studies indicate that, with
proper medical care, I may achieve a “normal” life span. And in our
society, with its vision of death as the ultimate evil, worse even than
decrepitude, the response to such news is, “Oh well, at least youʼre
not going to die.” Are there worse things than dying? I think that there
may be.
I think of two women I know, both with MS, both enough older than I
to have served me as models. One took to her bed several years ago
and has been there ever since. Although she can sit in a high-backed
wheelchair, because she is incontinent she refuses to go out at all,
even though incontinence pants, which are readily available at any
pharmacy, could protect her from embarrassment. Instead, she stays
at home and insists that her husband, a small quiet man, a retired
civil servant, stay there with her except for a quick weekly foray to the
supermarket. The other woman, whose illness was diagnosed when
she was eighteen, a nursing student engaged to a young doctor,
finished her training, married her doctor, accompanied him to
Germany when he was in the service, bore three sons and a
daughter, now grown and gone. When she can, she travels with her
husband; she plays bridge, embroiders, swims regularly; she works,
like me, as a symptomatic-patient instructor of medical students in
neurology. Guess which woman I hope to be.
At the beginning, I thought about having MS almost incessantly. And
because of the unpredictable course of the disease, my thoughts
were always terrified. Each night Iʼd get into bed wondering whether
Iʼd get out again the next morning, whether Iʼd be able to see, to
speak, to hold a pen between my fingers. Knowing that the day might
come when Iʼd be physically incapable of killing myself, I thought
perhaps I ought to do so right away, while I still had the strength.
Gradually I came to understand that the Nancy who might one day lie
inert under a bedsheet, arms and legs paralyzed, unable to feed or
bathe herself, unable to reach out for a gun, a bottle of pills, was not
the Nancy I was at present, and that I could not presume to make
decisions for that future Nancy, who might well not want in the least
to die. Now the only provision Iʼve made for the future Nancy is that
when the time comes—and it is likely to come in the form of
pneumonia, friend to the weak and the old—I am not to be treated
with machines and medications. If she is unable to communicate by
then, I hope she will be satisfied with these terms.
Thinking all the time about having MS grew tiresome and intrusive,
especially in the large and tragic mode in which I was accustomed to
considering my plight. Months and even years went by without
catastrophe (at least without one related to MS), and really I was
awfully busy, what with George and children and snakes and
students and poems, and I hadnʼt the time, let alone the inclination, to
devote myself to being a disease. Too, the richer my life became, the
funnier it seemed, as though there were some connection between
largesse and laughter, and so my tragic stance began to waver until,
even with the aid of a brace and a cane, I couldnʼt hold it for very long
at a time.
After several years I was satisfied with my adjustment. I had suffered
my grief and fury and terror, I thought, but now I was at ease with my
lot. Then one summer day I set out with George and the children
across the desert for a vacation in California. Part way to Yuma I
became aware that my right leg felt funny. “I think Iʼve had an
exacerbation,” I told George. “What shall we do?” he asked. “I think
weʼd better get the hell to California,” I said, “because I donʼt know
whether Iʼll ever make it again.” So we went on to San Diego and then
to Orange, up the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Cruz, across to
Yosemite, down to Sequoia and Joshua Tree, and so back over the
desert to home. It was a fine two-week trip, filled with friends and fair
weather, and I wouldnʼt have missed it for the world, though I did in
fact make it back to California two years later. Nor would there have
been any point in missing it, since in MS, once the symptoms have
appeared, the neurological damage has been done, and thereʼs no
way to predict or prevent that damage.
The incident spoiled my self-satisfaction, however. It renewed my
grief and fury and terror, and I learned that one never finishes
adjusting to MS. I donʼt know now why I thought one would. One does
not, after all, finish adjusting to life, and MS is simply a fact of my
life—not my favorite fact, of course—but as ordinary as my nose and
my tropical fish and my yellow Mazda station wagon. It may at any
time get worse, but no amount of worry or anticipation can prepare
me for a new loss. My life is a lesson in losses. I learn one at a time.
And I had best be patient in the learning, since Iʼll have to do it like it
or not. As any rock fan knows, you canʼt always get what you want.
Particularly when you have MS. You canʼt, for example, get cured. In
recent years researchers and the organizations that fund research
have started to pay MS some attention even though it isnʼt fatal;
perhaps they have begun to see that life is something other than a
quantitative phenomenon, that one may be very much alive for a very
long time in a life that isnʼt worth living. The researchers have made
some progress toward understanding the mechanism of the disease:
It may well be an autoimmune reaction triggered by a slow-acting
virus. But they are nowhere near its prevention, control, or cure. And
most of us want to be cured. Some, unable to accept incurability,
grasp at one treatment after another; no matter how bizarre:
megavitamin therapy, gluten-free diet, injections of cobra venom,
hypothermal suits, lymphocytopharesjs, hyperbaric chambers. Many
treatments are probably harmless enough, but none are curative.
The absence of a cure often makes MS patients bitter toward their
doctors. Doctors are, after all, the priests of modern society, the new
shamans, whose business is to heal, and many an MS patient roves
from one to another, searching for the “good” doctor who will make
him well. Doctors too think of themselves as healers, and for this
reason many have trouble dealing with MS patients, whose disease
in its intransigence defeats their aims and mocks their skills. Too few
doctors, it is true, treat their patients as whole human beings, but the
reverse is also true. I have always tried to be gentle with my doctors,
who often have more at stake in terms of ego than I do. I may be
frustrated, maddened, depressed by the incurability of my disease,
but I am not diminished by it, and they are. When I push myself up
from my seat in the waiting room and stumble toward them, I
incarnate the limitation of their powers. The least I can do is refuse to
press on their tenderest spots.
This gentleness is part of the reason that Iʼm not sorry to be a cripple.
I didnʼt have it before. Perhaps Iʼd have developed it anyway—how
could I know such a thing?—and I wish I had more of it, but Iʼm glad
of what I have. It has opened and enriched my life enormously. This
sense that my frailty and need must be mirrored in others, that in
searching for and shaping a stable core in a life wrenched by change
and loss, change and loss, I must recognize the same process, under
individual conditions, in the lives around me. I do not deprecate such
knowledge, however Iʼve come by it.
All the same, if a cure were found, would I take it? In a minute. I may
be a cripple, but Iʼm only occasionally a loony and never a saint.
Anyway, in my brand of theology God doesnʼt give bonus points for a
limp. Iʼd take a cure; I just donʼt need one. A friend who also has MS
startled me once by asking, “Do you ever say to yourself, ʻWhy me,
Lord?”ʼ “No, Michael, I donʼt,” I told him, “because whenever I try, the
only response I can think of is ʻWhy not?”ʼ If I could make a cosmic
deal, whom would I put in my place? What in my life would I give up
in exchange for sound limbs and a thrilling rush of energy? No one.
Nothing. I might as well do the job myself. Now that Iʼm getting the
hang of it.
Copyright 1986. Arizona Board of Regents.
All Rights Reserved.
