Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

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What was going to happen to him? And what, if anything, could be done to prevent it? His neurologist had nothing good to tell him. MS is unpredictable. Each patient’s disease is as unique as a set of fingerprints. He might go blind, or lose his voice, or be incontinent. He might one day need to use a wheelchair, or be unable to feed himself. His thoughts might become confused. No one could say for sure. As for treatments, though individual symptoms can to a degree be managed, the neurologist could offer no pill that would slow down the progress of the disease, beyond the possibly beneficial effect of taking high doses of vitamin D.Metamorphosis is the best book I have read about multiple sclerosis, and that is because it is about so much more... It is simply a beautiful piece of writing. The Times When the trapdoor opened for Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, he plummeted into a world of MRI scans, a disobedient body and the crushing unpredictability of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. But, like Alice tumbling into Wonderland, his fall did something else. It took him deep into his own mind: his hopes, his fears, his loves and losses, and the books that would sustain, inform and nourish him as his life began to transform in ways he could never have imagined. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. An outstanding feat of bravery and brio... A buoyantly written, piercingly perceptive book. Sunday Times For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

He finally left hospital at Easter 2019. What’s eerie about this in retrospect (and anyone who reads his book, the first literary account of such a procedure, is bound to feel it) is the way that his isolation – a long pause attended by many masks and gowns – prefigured the pandemic, which would arrive only months later. He nods. “Yes, I’d had many months to prepare for the pandemic – and again, this is going to sound holier than thou, but I think it gave me more empathy for people when it began. I thought: I know what this is like. I’ve rehearsed this. It turns out I’m not a soloist, after all; there’s a whole chorus of people going through the same.” Uh oh, I say, groping it tentatively. This is a bit #MeToo. But what’s this? There’s something… stiff beneath his jeans. “Yes, I’ve started wearing knee pads,” he says. “For when I fall over.” Has he fallen over a lot lately? “No, but it means that when I do, there’s less chance I’ll end up in A&E.” This sounds so worrying and grave – and yet, he is smiling. His MS has, you see, changed his relationship with his body in ways that are – unlikely as this may sound – good as well as bad. His legs, these days, are often obdurate. But better wilful legs (and knee pads) than some other things: “The less the body works, the more you appreciate any bit that still does. My eyes, for instance, have settled down in the last couple of years, which for me is hugely significant. When I ended up in hospital with eyes that weren’t focusing properly, that was very scary. I don’t want to be too Pollyanna about this, but it’s better to be grateful for what you can do than to pine for what you can’t.”

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If this treatment works, nothing changes. That’s all you want’: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst at Magdalen College, Oxford. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer A pitch-perfect memoir: stylish, erudite, touchingly honest and darkly funny. Jacqueline Wilson, author of The Story of Tracy Beaker Written by an entertaining storyteller and offers a rare insight into a situation that few people will have to face, but that it does us good to contemplate. Mail on Sunday 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 If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

A beautiful and devastating portrayal of a life-changing diagnosis... It is what the best writing should be: a book that will stay with you for life. Natalie Haynes, author of A Thousand Ships 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 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 brilliant account of one man's tilted world following a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Observer MS is a fairly common illness, affecting around 100,000 people in England. But there are two kinds of the disease: relapsing remitting and primary progressive. Douglas-Fairhurst’s diagnosis was for the second kind, which is the more serious. Thanks to a faulty immune system response, the nerve cells of someone with MS are gradually stripped of their protective myelin sheaths, which means they can no longer carry instructions from the brain to the rest of the body without some of this information being lost along the way. The white lesions revealed by his MRI scan suggested it was likely his central nervous system had already suffered permanent damage. As he puts it in his book: “My body was dying like a coral reef.” There were moments when he could not think, as if his brain ‘had been replaced with a lump of warm paste’Level-headed and informative... What Douglas-Fairhurst gives us isn't just the story of an illness but a story about the importance of stories. Guardian Douglas-Fairhurst has called the book he has written about his illness Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces – a reference not only to the way his MS has transformed him physically, but a nod also to Franz Kafka’s novella of 1915, in which a salesman called Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find that overnight he has become a giant insect. In the days and weeks after his diagnosis, when things seemed frightening and bleak, Douglas-Fairhurst often thought of poor Gregor. Would his own fate be similar? (Though Samsa is at first cared for by his family, it isn’t long before he becomes a prisoner in his own bedroom, where eventually he dies.) Sometimes, it felt like it would. Heartening and unexpectedly gripping... An immensely powerful book... It persuasively builds the case for the ability of stories to offer hope and solace; to help us become ourselves, over and over, even in extremis. Spectator