PREFACE

“Oh God, Oh dear God; why me?” My head is a jumble of thoughts of anger, of frustrations, of questions, but mostly of fear. I mean, I’m not what you would call the scaredy type. I played a lot of football, did my time in the Korean “police action,” was involved with Air force intelligence and pulled a disability medical retirement out of the service – all by the time I was thirty. I know what pain is. I know what frustration is, but fear, real deep down to your core fear, is something new to me.

It’s a different fear than the kind you get when you know a big linebacker is going to nail you when you grab that little slant pass over the middle. Different too, than knowing the other guy has a gun just as big, or even bigger, than yours, or the fear that you get when you know you have just lost power on takeoff and the aircraft is going down.

Those kinds of fear I was able to deal with. I got myself into all those situations and knew the odds and all the possibilities going in, but this, this is different, this is the unknown. Nobody asked me to volunteer for this. I have no way of knowing the odds or even the possibilities, except that they are bad, real bad. The doctor has just told me that the reason I have suddenly lost my eyesight is that I have a disease called MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS.

“Oh man, no! You’re wrong. You’ve just got to be wrong!” My Uncle Jack, my mother’s youngest brother, had MS. From a dashing, handsome, career Army Officer during WW II, he became paralyzed, bed ridden, blind, almost a vegetable before he died a few years after the war. “That won’t happen to me! It can’t, I won’t let it.”

* * *

A few months later, I have regained most of my eyesight. I have been to the Veteran’s Administration several times, but instead of helping me, they have just made it official:

Disability increased. Diagnosis: Multiple Sclerosis, contracted while in the service of my country.

“Contracted how?”

“Ah…Nobody knows.”

“What kind of treatment can I take to get rid of it?”

“We doctors are working on that, but for right now, nobody knows.”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“Well…Nobody really knows for sure what might happen to anyone with MS”

“What should I do now?”

“Ah…Nobody knows that either. Just be brave.”

“Brave, Hell! How can you be brave when you’ve got something that

nobody knows how you got and nobody knows how to get rid of?”

…”Nobody knows. We’ll send you to see a psychiatrist.”