My MS
Open Door - May 2007 pages 12-13
James Buxton
I was diagnosed with MS in 1984. Over the previous year or so I had become worried about patches of numbness in my legs and an occasional slight limp. Sometimes my fingers didn't seem to hit the keys properly when I typed. But I could hardly believe that I should be so unlucky as to be confirmed as suffering from a dreaded progressive disease from which there was and is no cure. I was 37 and working in Italy as the Rome correspondent of the Financial Times.
It took me about a year and half to get over the shock and sadness of the diagnosis and initially I went into denial. At that time the symptoms I suffered most of the time weren't all that bad, mostly some limping and patches of numbness in different places. But two or three times a year I had attacks of lameness or severe foot dragging. Each began gently but got steadily worse. To treat them my doctor prescribed steroid tablets, which cleared them up in a few weeks.
This phase of relapsing/remitting MS went on for about three years. My condition then became secondary progressive MS, the type of MS that the majority of people with MS have, in which the symptoms gradually worsen but usually without fierce attacks. In my case the disease mainly affects my legs and my bladder. But the deterioration has been uneven: there are good days or even good weeks, but also bad days.
At an early stage I had to work out with my employer a way of adapting my career to the illness. I was anyway nearing the end of a foreign posting in Rome. I didn't feel up to taking on a highly stressful job for the FT in another foreign city, while going back to head office in London didn't appeal.
The deputy editor proposed that I should become the paper's Scotland correspondent based in Edinburgh. After exploring the idea for a time I accepted gladly. I already knew Edinburgh and Scotland a bit, and the job seemed do-able. It meant preserving my independence as a 'foreign' correspondent whilst coming back to the UK. So with my wife and two small sons I moved to Edinburgh in 1986.
Eventually I stayed for 13 years as the FT's Scotland correspondent, writing about the economy, business, finance and politics north of the border. The FT exempted me from its normal policy of moving people around every few years. Although the people on the newsdesk in head office to whom I reported knew about my condition, my MS wasn't constantly thrust before them in the way it would have been if I had been working there. I was just a voice on the telephone. They assumed that if I thought I would have difficulty carrying out an assignment I would let them know. In practice that almost never happened.
Early on the FT pressed the council to give me a disabled parking badge so I could park outside the office in central Edinburgh. I had a car with automatic gears and hand controls, and used to drive to the station and take the train to Glasgow. I would also drive up to Inverness or get on planes to Shetland or the Western Isles. For about ten years I walked up two flights of steps to the office.
I knew I had to make the most of my life before my MS got worse. In the mid-1990s I fulfilled a long-held ambition of going to Antarctica, flying on my own to South America and joining a cruise. My MS remained stable and everything went OK. At that stage I was using one walking stick.
However my condition was gradually making getting around harder. I took early retirement from the FT in 1999. But thanks to computers and modern telecommunications I was able to carry on contributing to the newspaper on a part time basis from home, as well as doing freelance writing and editing, which I still do.
In 2001 my mobility suffered a setback and the council's occupational therapist recommended that my wife and I had a through-the-floor lift installed, for which the council provided some financial assistance. It was a year before it was done but it freed me wonderfully from having to walk up and down the stairs with my sticks. We also had to alter the bathroom to make it accessible to a wheelchair. The council provided aids for the bed, toilet and bath.
By 2003 I was using a wheelchair pretty much all the time. Fortunately our house has wide passages and is completely level on both floors. In 2005 we eliminated the two front doorsteps by having the level of the paving outside raised. I can now summon and board a black taxi, which, thanks to the Disability Discrimination Act, will take me around Edinburgh sitting in my wheelchair. Thanks also to that legislation there is now a good chance that any recently constructed buildings I visit will be accessible.
So my life has changed drastically from those sunny days in Rome. The deterioration in my health has been awful but my life has been made better than it might have been, thanks initially to a sympathetic employer, and to a highly supportive wife, helpful social services, and the advance of legislation and technology.
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