#MS Insights: Transformed by #Illness

Written on 18th July 2015 by Shulamit Lando

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Everything I know and everything I have learned came thanks to the surprise that life had in store for me: MS (Multiple Sclerosis), a supposedly incurable and degenerative disease. All of what I write, even if it is not specifically related to it, came from the broadening of awareness that I got in and through the process of learning to deal and eventually heal from illness.

 

What matters is not what happens to you, but what you do with your life.

This is the first page of a book I am writing called TRANSFORMED BY ILLNESS — A guide from down-and-out to back on you feet.

It is the story of my illness and the healing process which permitted me to return to a meaningful and rewarding life.

The story begins with receiving an apocalyptic diagnosis and shares the journey which transformed me from victim to a vehicle for helping others.

As I write, many images and voices come into my mind and want to stop me in my tracks.  Who am I to share my small story? What are they going to say? But, who are “they?”  They are all those who suffer and have suffered more than me and that make a huge transformation in the world. How do I dare to set myself up as someone who can teach others about illness and transformation!

I am not suggesting that I can offer a miracle cure. A miracle is something that is completely individually defined. One person may consider an event to be a miracle, whereas someone else might see exactly the same thing as sheer luck or as a total fluke.

However, I have found that often, when people who are not believers, spiritual or even the slightest bit religious experience disease, they start counting their blessings, noticing events and seeing them as “signs”. They begin to perceive the good things that happen, things that they may have taken for granted in the past, as special events. That kind of changed consciousness is itself miraculous to me.

I am writing this book because so many of us who have to deal with diseases that cover the spectrum from limiting, to debilitating, to downright crippling, who might benefit from what I have found on my own journey from illness to wellness. I am convinced that for me, MS or not, it was the journey itself that has been transformational, by giving meaning and direction to my life.

Maybe I was just lucky. Maybe my Multiple Sclerosis (MS) was so benign that there wasn’t really anything to worry about in the first place. True… but then, “maybe” can go both ways. About 50 percent of people with MS eventually enter a progressive stage. I never did. And for that, I want to knock on wood.

Maybe if had not done all the things I did — the mind-shifts and the lifestyle changes that I worked on with so much dedication—maybe it would have turned out much worse. In those terrible early days, when I was in the throes of an acute attack, almost paralyzed up to my earlobes, slow in every way, very weak, my brain and body not connecting, I had no way of knowing if the symptoms were ever going to go away. Maybe I’d never get out of it, maybe I’d always drag my arm or walk with a limp, or maybe —since with the illness affecting my speech I sounded as if I’d just drunk a whole bottle of tequila— I’d never sound normal again. All these things could have happened. Every time I had an attack, there was no reassurance that I was going to recover.

Was I blessed with a milder form of MS?  I surely didn’t know that then and the nightmare lasted for 15 years. Perhaps, had I not done everything I did, I might have become so depressed that my immune system would have shifted my so-called “benign” situation into a disastrous one.

Later, after I was able to recover and to create a new life for myself, some of the neurologists I had consulted for myself started to send their desperate clients to me for therapy. Sure enough, when a person suffers from a chronic or a life threatening illness, the whole family suffers. So part of the help I have been able to offer clients has been also to help their family and caregivers.

Dis-ease, as the word implies, is a lack of ease in body, emotions, and mind. If the mind and the emotions can heal, then the body can also be cured from ailment.

This is a memoir, where I recount what I went through and how I felt with it all and through it. After every chapter, I give a thread of tips to help yourself. All the tips I share are effective and proven approaches to dealing with overwhelming feelings and which will allow healing and clam to come into your life. These tips imply an effort on the person’s part, but they do work. Of course, according to the effort is the reward.

So if you –or a loved one– are suffering from any kind of dis-ease, practicing the tools I share both in my book and in my practice as a Life Coach, as a Medical Coach and as a Therapist will enable you to turn your life around. Go for it with all your might, and you will see results. Your life will be transformed.