Remembering Dreams

When the Road Turns: Inspirational Stories About People with MS
by Margot Russell

Each week in the United States 200 people are diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, adding exponentially to the 350,000 people nationwide and the 2.5 million people worldwide with MS. This book is the first of its kind to share the real-life struggles and triumphs of those facing MS in one inspiring collection.

In their own compelling words, seventeen people with MS take you on a journey sharing their dreams, their emotional and physical battles, their struggle to accept the illness and their courage to create new lives. People like Israeli artist Inbal Tsur, who discovers a new way to paint after losing the use of her arms; renowned oceanographer Richard Radtke, who becomes the first disabled man to reach the South Pole; a pilot who battles the FAA to keep her pilot's license; and a woman who is now enjoying life as a mother to a new baby despite doctors' advice not to further risk her health by becoming pregnant.

When the Road Turns will be an encouragement for anyone with MS or other chronic illness, as well as those who want to better understand the disease, which may be affecting someone they love.

Chapter 12

By now you may have heard my story. The first of my MS symptoms appeared when I was in the Naval Academy, I've had recurring bouts every two years, and was misdiagnosed for about 20 years since then. But the details of my diagnosis are not important. What I've done with it is.

When I heard the three words "You have MS", like the authors of these stories, I denied, grieved, raged, self-pitied and despaired. I wondered if the fire in my feet would ever go away. I worried that my career and livelihood would be taken from me. I thought about leaving this planet, but couldn't do that to the people who loved me. I sat around for 60 days going "woe is me", but at the end of 60 days where did that get me? Then a friend said to me said, "I don't understand you. You've met every other challenge life has thrown your way. You've moved every other mountain. Why is this one any different?"

The words "You have MS" changed my life, but my friend's words saved my life. Because that's when I realized that I've never let anyone or anything define me, define my limits, or take away my hope. And I wasn't about to let MS.

That's what I like about these stories. MS doesn't define these authors, they define MS. They are not waiting around for MS to beat them, they are working, living, playing and beating MS. Each of them has discovered that switch in their minds that turned them from MS sufferers to MS survivors. The day I found that switch was the day I realized, I have MS, it doesn't have me.

One of my favorite adages is "What have I done today that's worth talking about tomorrow?" What each of these authors has accomplished is worth talking about. They remind me of a favorite quote from Anne Frank: "Whoever is happy will make others happy too. He who has courage and faith will never perish in misery."

I paused for a moment to catch my breath and readjust my gear. We had already climbed several hundred feet up the mountain, and I was slowly becoming ill from the altitude. I had fallen behind my group by stopping to rest, fighting off the dizziness and physical fatigue.

Below me the gentle Urubamba River curved gracefully along the valley in the Andes Mountains of Peru. It had been just three hours since jumping off the rustic train from Cuzco with the others, literally in the middle of nowhere, to begin our hike along the ancient Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Now I was several thousand feet up the mountain and had miles to go before we stopped for the night. I was battling fatigue, altitude sickness and my own uncertainty that I would make it to the top.

For almost half my life I had wanted to travel to Machu Picchu. I think I stumbled upon a picture of it in my younger years, and it became an icon of what the endless world had to offer. It seemed a place of mystery and hidden adventure, a place that ordinary travel could not take you.

The world is such a magnificent place; its pockets full of exotic coins and drawers of foreign fabric. I imagine that we'd all like to collect a trinket or two from the corner of everywhere and dangle them like charms from a bracelet.

We dream of the places we will go; we dream of the things we can do. We are dancing on a slow boat down the Nile. We are taking tea with the Queen, having remembered our gloves. We bring those dreams out like an old party dress from time to time and try them on for size. We wonder if they still fit.

Years before I finally got there, my Machu Picchu dream resurfaced with a surprising reverie. My father was traveling around the world and I imagined I could meet him if he stopped there.

It was an idea whose time had not come. I was the mother of three little girls and my husband and I were laying bricks. We had only the station wagon, not the white picket fence or a family dog. Dreams of travel were in the file marked "extravagant."

I had been taught that travel was something you earned. It's a retirement gift you give to yourself, or something you do in the Navy. For us ordinary folk, far away from the fur-clad women on the deck of the Titanic, travel was extraordinary.

But when my father returned from his adventure two years later-freshly tanned, knapsack full of maps and trinkets-I began to see travel as an ordinary membrane that I could pass through. He had often lived in a tent and eaten by the campfire with other adventurers who were hoping to see a different sky. He had forsaken fancy hotels and expensive restaurants in lieu of the road less traveled. My vagabond thoughts were changed forever; anyone could be a Christopher Columbus.

My life had begun to change, too, and there was now open space to consider. My future stood before me like a vast, endless plain. I was divorced and struggling to provide a life for my children. I was a madwoman, running to my job as a radio news reporter, and then running to daycare afterward. I would gather my children by the scruffs of their necks and plunk them down in the kitchen, where yesterday's dishes and last month's bills crowded our thoughts and the countertops.

© 2001. All rights reserved. Reprinted from When The Road Turns by Margot Russell.

About the Author

Margot Russell has worked as a news broadcaster, a reporter and a television producer, and was diagnosed with MS in 1998. She is a speaker and Executive Director of the Sea of Dreams Foundation, which creates programs to better the lives of the disabled.