Elizabeth Fleming describes how it is possible to overcome a body blow and change your life for the better

When I was younger, I remember being told by my grandfather to make sure that whatever path I chose to take in life, I should make sure I lived it to the full. He was a big believer in not letting life just pass you by. I responded in that typical teenage way: ‘Of course I will, I know what I’m doing.’ Little did I realise that 10 years later those words would take on a very real meaning. How I wish he had lived to see me take them on board.

17th November 1997
The day my life changed forever, my D-Day. After more than a year of tests, examinations and being poked around by various doctors, I was finally given my diagnosis. I sat there in the small room and listened to my neurologist say the words: ‘I am very sorry to tell you this, but I think you knew it was coming. You have multiple sclerosis.’ I thought that the bottom had fallen out of my world. I barely heard a word of what he said after that. I was in a daze. Someone had finally said the words I had been dreading for the past 12 months. Despite all the symptoms – the blurred vision, the pins and needles in my limbs, the panic attacks and occasional back pains – I had always hoped that maybe it was just stress or fatigue. Hoped that one day I would wake up and the aches would be gone. Now that would never happen.

I went home, shut myself in my room, and cried. All I could think was that everything I had always taken for granted – getting married, having a family, playing with my children, even becoming an abseiling granny – suddenly didn’t seem so possible any more. How would I ever find anyone who would want to spend the rest of their life with me if there was a possibility they would have to spend a large chunk of married life caring for me? I was only 25. How could this have happened to me? All I could see was a bleak future.

A couple of days later my thoughts changed to a bitter acceptance. I kept thinking that if I was going to be a cripple anyway then why not just do what the hell I wanted to do – it wouldn’t make any difference. I started, subconsciously, on a path to self-destruction. I stopped working at my career, choosing to run away abroad instead. I took a bar job with as few hours as possible and started drinking and smoking heavily. I was going out every night until the early hours, telling friends who tried to help me to keep their noses out – after all, they didn’t know what it was like did they?

Then one afternoon about seven months later as I was sat at home nursing my head and wondering how on earth I’d got home the night before, I woke up. As I was pondering, yet again, the unfairness of my situation, I suddenly realised that all I was doing was hurting myself and, in the long run, making myself more ill. I decided there and then to take control of the situation instead of letting it take control of me.

The first thing I did was book an appointment with my neurologist, something I had failed to do for the past seven months, despite repeated reminders from his office. Then, because I had made this grand decision to change things and I had no idea what to do next, I decided to make a list. I wrote down every ambition that I had, however small, and as I looked at it I realised that I had managed to forget the very thing my grandfather spent so long trying to drum into my arrogant teenage head years before.

So I did what every self-respecting twenty-something does when they realise they need to change things and don’t know how to start – I called my mum. And she did exactly what I knew she would and told me to come home.

From that moment, everything changed. It began with the material things – getting my finances in order, getting a steady job – the basics needed to put my life back on the straight and narrow. But that was just the surface. My outlook on the little things in life totally changed. Suddenly all those email poems that I had dismissed as ‘sentimental rubbish’ seemed to make sense.

I cleared my life of all the excess baggage – those friendships into which I had put all the effort and received nothing in return; the projects I had started half-heartedly but was never going to finish. Instead I started to focus on what was really important to me.

Three years later, I have changed in many subtle ways. I make the point of telling my family and friends that I love them and giving them a hug when I feel like it instead of holding back. When a stranger smiles at me I smile back or say hi instead of looking away. The little things no longer niggle me (well, they do occasionally – but hey, I’m only human). Instead I’ve learned to put life into perspective, to just shrug my shoulders and walk away. If I feel like going away somewhere or doing something different, I no longer procrastinate about it for weeks, I just go ahead and do it. If I am having a tough day, then I make a point of telling myself before I go to sleep that tomorrow will be better. You know what – it always is. It is amazing, the power that positive thought can have over the other aspects of everyday life.

A couple of weeks ago I was having a bad day. A friend asked me what was wrong and I told her that I wished for once that I could wake up one morning and not be ill, not have those nagging fears in the back of my mind every time I felt a twinge in a muscle or nerve. She asked me how I coped with my illness and how I always kept so positive. When I told her, she thought for a minute and then said she was going to follow my example and put into practice in her own life everything I had said. She said it should be an example of how to go through life regardless of anyone’s situation.

The more I thought about it, the more correct I realised she was. It took a serious illness and some pretty obnoxious behaviour to make me realise what was important in life, but in reality the changes I made are changes that any one of you could make at any time. Believe me it works, I know.

There’s still a lot I want to achieve. I still have those unfinished projects, but I will finish them sometime – honestly. I still haven’t got round to finding my dream career, but I am on my way there. And I still don’t have that husband and kids, but they’ll come along in time. Oh, and I still harbour ambitions to become that abseiling granny! Maybe one day.

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