Mary Lou Jepsen Quotes

My dad was in a wheelchair and on oxygen for the last few years of his life.

I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.

I don't want to lose my legs, you know. I don't want to be wheeled around in a wheelchair. I don't want to be attached to a catheter. I saw all that stuff happen to my father, and as much as it upset me because I loved my father so much, it also really traumatized me.

The truth is my dad was a lovely man who had to retire early from his job as an engineer because he had osteoporosis. It meant he was forced to wear a harness and could hardly breathe.

I would not want to live with a tube in my neck and not be able to move a finger. I wouldn't - that to me is not life.

I fell and broke my pelvic bone in three places. So, I'm still sort of an invalid now.

I can't bear the thought of my mother having to push me around in a wheelchair. I'd rather die quickly.

I have a form of Parkinson's disease, which I don't like. My legs don't move when my brain tells them to. It's very frustrating.

When Joe Kennedy had his stroke, all our plans went out the window.

You never think about your own mortality. At least not until your back gives way when you're 40.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I've got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

I've had versions of disability my whole life, first with my hearing and then when I couldn't walk for over a year.

Going from toting a machine gun in Afghanistan... to using a bed pan, and I can't even put my own socks on - that was hard to kind of suck it up.

I may never have a normal life again.

At the time I was asked if I would ever step back in a race car, but what was very important for me was to go into the bathroom and pee on my own, but I could not do that. I had to be helped. That was my number one priority.

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain! Blind among enemies, O worse than chains, dungeon or beggary, or decrepit age! Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct, and all her various objects of delight annulled, which might in part my grief have eased. Inferior to the vilest now become of man or worm; the vilest here excel me, they creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed to daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong, within doors, or without, still as a fool, in power of others, never in my own; scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.

This disease leaves people bedridden. I've gone through phases where I couldn't roll over in bed. I couldn't speak. To have it called 'fatigue' is a gross misnomer.

I am doing better now though one of my legs is shorter than the other due to the operations.

I decided to write 'True Refuge' during a major dive in my own health. Diagnosed with a genetic disease that affected my mobility, I faced tremendous fear and grief about losing the fitness and physical freedom I loved.

I'm blind in my left eye. Contrary to what people say, it is not a glass eye, so I have to protect my eyes at all cost.

Everywhere I go people come up to me, they mob me - anyone who has MS or has a relative with MS - they come up and hug and cry.

The biggest problem has been exhaustion. I've spent about 6 of the last 14 years completely bedridden.

My knee has always given me problems. But it got to the point where I actually had to start giving up things. And I hate that.

My spine healed incorrectly. There were long periods when I'd be perfectly all right, and then there were many other times when I wasn't, when my back would give out and throw me down to the floor amid waves of nauseating pain.

The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.