2004-12-04 - 11:41 p.m.
Today marked four years of me having MS. (I only remember the exact date because it was a Monday and I switched office locations that day.) I was going to recount the story of first getting sick or my thoughts on being diagnosed or the first time the reality of it sank in, but I�m afraid I�m in the middle of finals and I just don�t have time. Maybe I�ll write about those things at some point. But for now, here�s something I wrote a few weeks ago for a class. Laura had some minor celebrity of a sort with a radio diary on NPR called �My So-Called Lungs� about her cystic fibrosis (I never listened; I�m not really into NPR). We saw a videotape of a speech she gave and a �20/20� segment. She was just a regular girl; it was really moving. Here�s my props:
Laura Rothenberg is my hero. No, really. I never even met her, but she�s one of the reasons I�m at Brown. In the summer of 2002, I had just gotten accepted to Brown as a resumed undergrad and I was starting to question whether returning to school now was just foolhardy. Not just the being older thing that all pending RUEs go through, but being sick. Although MS hadn�t seriously impacted my daily life yet, I knew it eventually could (as it has). What the hell am I doing? I asked my neurologist what the chances were I�d develop vision loss so that I couldn�t read. With exquisite bedside manner, he scoffed �Well, I wouldn�t worry about that. I mean, what if you get aphasia?� Uhm. Thanks, doc. (He has since switched hospitals.)
Then I heard about Laura. This was someone with a far more serious chronic illness, someone who was terminal. And for what she knew could very well be her final act, she was going to college. To Brown. Hells, yeah. If she can do it, I can do it. I don�t really care that, when I finally read her book, I find a large portion is just journal entries about waiting (I suppose I also spend a lot of boring time waiting, albeit for cabs and stuff, not organ transplants). I don�t even care that she quotes Tom Petty lyrics. I understand that her main dream was to be seen as �normal�, not some exemplar, but Laura was an absolute inspiration to me.
I was always a smart guy. Often unwise, no doubt, but never unintelligent. Even in my darkest hours, even when temping at some cruddy job or sleeping in an abandoned building, my master status was always �that Geoff, he�s a smart guy�. If I wasn�t terminal now, my irrational fear of the distant possibility of cognitive problems sometimes made me feel I could be heading into a final act as �smart guy�. I could think of no way I�d rather go out than reading and writing and learning. I was an Ivy League student once; I had decided I wanted to be again. Laura showed it could be done, even in the face of death. If she can do it, I can do it.
We never met, but I sent Laura an email thanking her for giving me the confidence to go back to school. Unfortunately by the time I sent it, she had left school for her last hospital stay. I�d like to think that maybe her parents read it to her, but I don�t know. I usually bcc such things to myself, but, combing through emails from two years ago, I can�t find any record of it. Feh. But here�s to Laura anyway, wherever she may be. Without her example I probably wouldn�t be here, now, writing this.
� 2004 Geoff Gladstone
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