Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

Product Information

MS isn’t uncommon in the UK. It affects around two people in every thousand (the average GP will have three or four patients with MS) and its incidence increases the further north you go – perhaps through a combination of genetic susceptibility and cloudier skies. Twenty years ago, when I worked in Edinburgh’s department of clinical neurosciences, there were few treatments: we used to give infusions of immunoglobulin, and sometimes interferon (a protein that affects signalling between white blood cells). The advice at that time was to withhold treatment until late in the progress of an episode. Though the disease remains incurable there are now various treatments that can slow its progress and diminish its severity. These days my neurology colleagues treat early and aggressively, and there are several immunomodulator drugs available that tweak the actions of the white blood cells involved in generating the plaques.

Bladder: no alarms are going off just yet, but I will need to remain in a cat-like state of readiness all day ed. with Seamus Perry), Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays (Oxford University Press, 2009) Mood: tantalisingly close to hitting that elusive sweet spot between optimism (the hope that things can always get better) and realism (the understanding that I should just be grateful if they don’t get any worse) His treatment was intended to reset his immune system. But it recalibrated so many other things besides: his relationships with other people, and with his surroundings. He has, he believes, become a kinder, more empathic person, and like the writer Dennis Potter, who famously thought, as he was dying of cancer, that the apple blossom outside his window was “ the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom there could ever be”, he finds the world to be so much more vivid now. “When I came out of hospital there was this blooming, buzzing confusion that I write about, and I don’t think that’s ever gone away. I’m more sharply aware of everything. I’m reborn.” He laughs. “When I finally lose my legs, maybe I’ll lie in bed hating the world. I’ll probably be deeply bitter. But for now…” A darkly comic and moving reflection on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor.

Retailers:

Reviewer and features writer for publications including the Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, Guardian, Times, Art Newspaper, TLS, and Vogue; columnist for the Oxford Times 2012-13. A darkly comic and moving reflection on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor

When I was younger, the idea that my body wouldn’t immediately do what I wanted it to would have been simply inconceivable. Now I realise that this wasn’t just the thoughtlessness of youth. It was the thoughtlessness of health. My polemic of the year is Victoria Smith’s righteously angry Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women I completed my BA at the University of Cambridge in 1990, before spending a year as a Procter Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. In 1992 I started a PhD at Cambridge, which I completed in 1998. I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Fitzwilliam College in 1995, and the following year I joined Emmanuel College as a Fellow in English. I moved to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 2002 as a Fellow and Tutor and CUF Lecturer in English Language and Literature. In 2015 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.The unique power that stem cells have to heal existing damage in the body means that researchers have long recognised their potential to promote the repair of diseased or defective organs. Haematopoietic stem cells have been used to treat conditions such as leukaemia and lymphoma, in a process that involves severely weakening the patient’s immune and blood system through radiation or chemotherapy, and then transplanting stem cells derived from either the patient themselves or a matched donor’s bone marrow or peripheral blood. This is known as haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). With everyone in the picture, Douglas-Fairhurst proceeded to do what he has done ever since he was a child: he read furiously, hoping to make sense of the new world in which he found himself. Scanning his bookshelves, he found a volume he’d bought on the strength of its title alone. The Journal of a Disappointed Manis a memoir, first published in 1919, by the naturalist Bruce Cummings under the pseudonym WNP Barbellion. An account of its author’s experiences of what was then known as “disseminated sclerosis” – Cummings died the year it came out, aged just 30 – it had a powerful effect on Douglas-Fairhurst, one he describes compellingly in Metamorphosis. “Reading someone like him, who goes through a worse version of what I’m going through, is a form of homeopathy,” he says. “You introduce this element of trauma into your life, but at one remove, in a way you can control. It allows you a critical vantage point, enabling you to understand the illness from the inside and the outside simultaneously.” You either struggle against that, or you relax into it, and it turned out that I was one of those who could relax into it