Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

£9.495
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Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

RRP: £18.99
Price: £9.495
£9.495 FREE Shipping

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The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This is a homage to the healing power of reading as much as to the incredible medical advances of stem cell transplantation. 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. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and an award-wining biographer and critic.

Most alarming of all, there were moments when he could not think, as if his brain “had been replaced with a lump of warm paste”. The book ought to be gruelling and it doesn’t shrink from candour about the trials of MS – the pain, anxiety, shame and self-pity, and the thoughts of ending them at Dignitas. Words stop working, and it is hard to make a joke when one is afraid of making some ghastly breach of taste, like farting in church.Other authors include Beckett, Burgess, Joyce, Keats, Tennyson, Heine – among many, many others – and, of course, Kafka – varifocal lenses on other worlds. As he says to his students at the end of his introductory lecture at the beginning of each academic year, literature is not a mirror, rather it is ‘a lens we could use to refocus our understanding of the world.

But he knows there are few better places in which to be ill than an Oxford college (he has been at Magdalen for 20 years).What I needed was laughter,’ Douglas-Fairhurst says, and later, ‘the worst was not, so long as I could still look at it with a comic squint. It was a shuffling in his legs that had made Douglas-Fairhurst seek medical advice – and now a neurologist confirmed the worst. 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.

AHSCT cannot repair existing damage to the brain and spinal cord, but up to 70% of patients with primary progressive MS who undergo it are able to halt the disease’s development. Reading someone like him, who goes through a worse version of what I’m going through, is a form of homeopathy,” he says. The last thing you want is well-intentioned but unhelpful advice, when everyone becomes Google doctor.

Since then, one drug has been approved by Nice [the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence], albeit not a very effective one. I found this upsetting as myself and others simply have to choices, the NHS is too streched and the only option is to muddle through a descent towards increased poverty and dissolution. A few seconds later I found myself peeing into a bush, just outside my front door, while an elderly neighbour walked past tutting and her dog looked back at me with a new found respect. 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. 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.



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