Writer Robert Douglas-Fairhurst: ‘The less the body works, the more you appreciate any bit that still does’

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The writer and professor of English literature on being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and the more unexpected ways his life has been transformed

have won literary prizes, and who has acted as the historical consultant on, among other productions, the TV seriesfilms, gamely waves an ankle at me. “Feel my knee!” he instructs. “Go on! Feel it.”stiff

MS is a fairly common illness, affecting around 100,000 people in England. But there are two kinds of the disease: relapsing remitting and primary progressive. Douglas-Fairhurst’s diagnosis was for the second kind, which is the more serious.

Was he shocked to hear all this? He was. But he was also preternaturally calm. “It wasn’t clear the disease definitely would get worse, or howit would if it did,” he says, handing me a slice of homemade fruit cake. “While it was entirely possible that 20 years could go by and I wouldn’t notice any difference, it was also possible it could be the trigger for all kinds of disastrous things happening to my body.

With everyone in the picture, Douglas-Fairhurst proceeded to do what he has done ever since he was a child: he read furiously, hoping to make sense of the new world in which he found himself. Scanning his bookshelves, he found a volume he’d bought on the strength of its title alone.is a memoir, first published in 1919, by the naturalist Bruce Cummings under the pseudonym WNP Barbellion.

Scouring the internet in search of something – anything – that might slow its progress, one phrase kept coming up: autologous haematopoietic stem cell transplantation , a process that involves severely weakening the immune system with high-dose radiation and/or chemotherapy, after which the patient receives a transplant of his own stem cells . Such treatment is complicated, expensive , and carries with it the risk of severe complications; some specialists regard it as “desperation haematology”.

 

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