Spirit

Spirit

“Suppose you get up before dawn, bike 20 miles in under an hour, then shower and arrive at work before anybody else does. You work a 12-hour day at the office, where you do some mentally challenging work that involves a lot of stress and being on your feet a lot. After work, you head out to the gym where you lift weights for an hour. By 11pm, you hit the nightclubs where you drink beer and dance with as many people as you can find. At 2am, you set out for home but you can't find a taxi for the life of you, so you walk 5 miles to your apartment building where you find that the elevator has broken down yet again. You live on the 10th floor, so you walk up the steps, all 200-some of them. Think about how tired you feel when you finally hit the sack. Imagine that leaden feeling that comes when the day has well and truly been seized. I lived days similar to that when I was young, and I remember them well. With multiple sclerosis, that's how I feel when I first get up in the morning.” This amazing woman is Marna; a mother of three, a loyal wife, a painter, and quite possibly the most valiant woman I have ever met.

Marna goes on to say, “I have done so much research on this thing, it sometimes makes me sick. I feel as if I know so much about my illness, then some news comes out on the internet and I feel like I’m not doing anything to help myself. It’s so frustrating. Some of the sensory experiences I've had recently are like being on a wild roller-coaster ride through my own senses. They get mixed up. Sometimes touch feels like hot, hot feels like cold, and cold feels like pain. Sometimes I lose the internal positioning sense of my own body, for example, I can hold up my hands in front of my face and yet my body's internal sensors say that they are about 6 inches away from where I see them.”

In our discussion of how she started to paint, she explained to me that it is a sort of release for her. It allows her to temporarily forget about her illness and transcends her into another place. Marna pulled out a few of her paintings and they reminded me a bit of Georgia O’Keeffe. I mentioned my thought to her and she said that she studied Georgia’s paintings and was one of her inspirations, along with many others. Marna told me that because of her illness, she can only paint for about an