Ruth Rendell Quotes

About six years ago my family was affected by multiple sclerosis.

I continually still fight every day for my life, not only still battling mental health problems but battling multiple sclerosis, which also has depression as one of its side effects.

My mother, Laura Sumner, had cerebral palsy. She was born absolutely fine, but after about three days, she started having convulsions that left her with a condition that would confine her to a wheelchair her entire life.

MS is not really a degenerative illness. It is not fatal, nor is it always progressive.

Seventy-five percent of MS sufferers are women.

Someday they may cure MS, that idiot thing. It gets in there and they can't get it out.

For a long time, they thought I had lupus, then they thought I had something else. Finally, when I couldn't walk, they did a spinal tap and conclusively diagnosed me with M.S.

I've had nine major operations in ten years. A lot of it is to do with something called retroperitoneal fibrosis, where the internal tissues attack each other.

I got really, really sick with a horrible disease called transverse myelitis; I lost my legs. I couldn't play anymore. It was a form of multiple sclerosis, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

When I was in my early twenties, I spent six months bedbound with a condition called Cholinergic Urticaria that basically means I'm allergic to heat, including my own body. It was bad.

At the time I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, my doctors told me that I had an incurable illness and they didn't know much about it.

I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.

My illness is excruciating and difficult to cope with. It takes over your entire life and causes more suffering than I can describe.

Parkinson's is a slow but inevitable process. It's hard living with it on a daily basis. The difficulty facing people with it is that they never quite know 'Can I or can't I do this today?'

I sometimes lament the fact that I do not have the benefit of a complete and ailment free body structure.

I found that this Parkinson's does slow you down, whether you want to slow down or not.

What makes spinal-cord injuries as devastating as they are is that everything about them plays out in absolutes: they are instantaneous, utterly disabling and horribly permanent.

I don't have feeling in my feet to my fingertips; I also have active lesions in my bone marrow and in my eyes.

When I got diagnosed, the more research I did about it - MS overall, as a subject, as a disease - there's a lot of misconceptions and there's a lot of unknowns about it, and there wasn't anyone out that was close to my age or close to anything like me out there.

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.

We have lost close friends and relatives to cancer and Parkinson's disease, and the level of personal suffering inflicted on patients and their families by these diseases is horrific.

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.

Before MS moved in on me, I'd worked for seven years as a city lawyer, as the editor of a literary magazine, and before the age of 20, I'd also worked as a cadet journalist and as an assistant director in both film and TV. And then, after the lesions of MS, both on my spine and in my brain, I was the opposite of bionic.

The sickle-cell got me where doctors said I couldn't play sports, I couldn't overexert myself.

I've never experienced chronic pain myself, but I have known many people over the years who have.