Finding Hope and Meaning in a Life Plagued by Chronic, Progressive Disease

While there's life, there's hope! ~ Cicero

Try to follow what Dean Ornish has to say in his heart healthy regimen in his books like "Reversing Heart Disease".  We have an epidemic of dementia in North America and the best thing you can do to protect yourself is to eat a heart healthy diet.   

One of my best medical drugs was synthroid to boost my thyroid (hyothyroidism is common with MS'ers) but my heart started fluttering occasionally so I stopped it for a few days and the heart thing seems to have stopped.  Drug interactions are a problem and it is hard to know what is going on.  Synthroid has been very helpful in reducing the bone numbing fatigue and it allows me to summon the will to get out of bed.  I have plenty of will power mentally but physically your own body can get impossible to influence.  If you have no adrenaline left, it gets very difficult to push yourself.

The miserable have no other medicine
But only hope.
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (1603), Act III, scene i

It is a real mental game dealing with a chronic, progressive disease and you need to be wary of depression and other unhealthy mental states.  Somehow sufferers need to turn this situation into an advantage.  Look at Michael J. Fox.  He has a similar affliction but used his celebrity to get the word out and raise lots of money for research.  Parkinson's is treatable, unlike M.S. and they know what causes it, unlike M.S. but it is certain to kill you you whereas M.S. just weakens you to the point where something else kills you.  

What a great scenario for a depressing movie, if you put together two guys in an apartment with these two diseases and try to decide which one should be Felix Unger or whoever the tidy guy was.   That could be pretty funny.  We saw an episode of "Rescue Me" on DVD last night.  Michael Fox plays a guy like himself except with a wheelchair.  His scenes, he mostly sits on  a couch and makes jokes about the x husband of his girlfriend.

Adopt the pace of Nature: Her secret is Patience, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Victor Frankel has written about how he used his time in Auschwitz to devolop his theories about the "Will to Meaning" that resides in humans.  He used his thinking to create a branch of psychiatry called Logo-therapy that says that we are responsible to create meaning in our lives and must do this to remain mentally healthy.  He said the worst thing about living in a Concentration Camp is that you never no when or if the suffering will end.  It is that way with M.S. and other chronic progressive diseases.  There is no end in sight to the suffering.  Yet you need to find your 'reason to live' otherwise life is too bleak to be able to continue living.

Goal: Consolidate my reading in one spot and summarize ideas in a digital book form Pdf over the Internet because it is cheaper than paper books and you don't need a publisher.  People want specific information like how to lose weight when they get things off the internet so you don't want to try and sell "War and Peace" this way.