With the addition of my new nemesis, multiple sclerosis (MS), I had seen the gradual subtraction of various interests and pastimes. I was forever labeled with a ‘Caution: Experiences Bouts of Drowsiness/Weakness/Cognitive loss’ sticker that had hindered my ability to work, operate a moving vehicle, and carry objects while walking. The purposely arranged, tightly- organized sectors of my life were dissolving around me, leaving me alone and empty. I turned to my oldest most beloved hobby, reading, to help me fill this void. Throughout the years, it had seen me through the good times and bad, and I knew it would not fail me now.
I read my first book, All the Pretty Horses, one bright, sunny afternoon sitting in the screened in back porch of our canary-yellow country house. An energetic five-year-old, I sat quietly and flipped the love worn pages of my brown paperback. Sounding out words as I went, I looked at pictures of spirited Dapples and Greys and dreamt of one day owning my own pretty horse. Some might say I had the prose memorized after demanding it be read gazillions of times, but I credited the Rainbow Levar Burton created, and my mom’s approach to calling the sandman.
Her soothing timbre as she made countless tales float off the pages lulled me to sleep every night throughout my tender years. Evenings were spent curled up with my sister on our bunkbeds, listening to Little House on the Prairie while I fought to keep my eyes open for one more chapter. Running through tall prairie grass, making little seem extravagant, camaraderie of sisters because there was no one else nearby—I could relate to all these things. The books came alive in my mind, creating vivid multicolored pictures and scenes, and ignited in me a zeal to start school so I could absorb more.
Unfortunately, as my thirteen years began at USD #399, I found my square peg couldn’t be pounded through their small, oblong hole; I would never fit. To say I started forming my misfit, nerd status at an impressionable age would be no exaggeration, but I didn’t care. I habitually finished my assignments early and escaped their uninspiring, insidious routines to entomb myself in the library’s shelves. Taking advantage of pay-to-play in its most rudimentary form, I constructed my fourth-grade teacher’s bi-monthly, educational bulletin boards, so I could then be allowed to quietly sit in the hall and become wholly engrossed in written words. I did whatever was required to escape boredom and delve into the pages of my current literary voyage.
As the years rolled on, the only significant changes were: my classes traveled six miles down the road to Paradise, and my books were lengthened by a few hundred sheets. Gone with the Wind were the Boxcar Children, and The Babysitter’s Club took a trip to Narnia. A seed of historical fiction planted by Laura Ingalls Wilder took root when I devoured the woes of Scarlett O’Hara in three nights, and I was left thirsting for more. Bedtimes were once again forgotten in lieu of just one more chapter in the tantalizing series, Shannara, that my siblings and I exchanged until their covers were falling off. Eventually, however, turbulent, teenager hormones threw an opaque cover over this carefree period.
The summer before ninth grade, driven by a misguided desire to fit in, I naïvely chose conformity over content and began trying to curve my squared corners. Consequently, when I was introduced to the three B’s of my high school, Books-Boys-Beer, my life was split: parents and teachers were only privy to the first two B’s, whereas social circles were centered around the latter pair. Books were downgraded to assignments in English and could now only be enjoyed in secret like a forbidden cigarette behind the gymnasium. My fervor for literary works had to lay dormant for a bit, but there was a kindling continuously smoldering.
During this hiatus from my riveting reads, I foolhardily believed my left hand knew not what my right did. However, my classmates had been with me since we were sticking glue and crayons in orifices where they didn’t belong, so my bookworm inclination was already well-known. Similarly, the biological brood and wisdom oracles of my life knew the behaviors of unwise, impulsive teenagers, and to think otherwise proved their assumptions accurate.
I eagerly planned on re-igniting my oldest obsession after I gave my valedictorian speech, walked across the stage, and flipped my tassel, but that plan was exasperatingly hindered. My yearning for a thought-provoking, penned piece would have to wait as my hardbacks took on the persona of massive educational tomes. Buried under their physical weight and mental encumberment, my realm shrunk and needed to center around textbooks for the next nine years. Little did I know, when the bottom fell out of my world, they would supply a firm island for me to stand on.
In 2003, I was diagnosed with MS, and my sphere shifted and attempted to spin off its axis. I determinedly refused to let this new setback frighten me from my aspirations; I had two years left of lugging Pharmacology and Applied Therapeutics hardbacks around in my JanSport backpack followed by 1500 hours of applied clinical practice. By propping myself up with stacks of texts and manuals, I buried myself in manuscripts of research studies and lines of 2500 page textbooks. I wanted to concentrate on my studies and avoid dealing with my health. When I graduated and finally closed my schoolbooks after twenty+ years in 2006, my new challenge became learning to ride the full-time career train with my new, unwanted and unfamiliar baggage attached.
As a segue from student to professional, I chose to complete a year-long residency at a rural Kentucky hospital. Fortunately, housing was provided throughout my tenure at a dusty, outdated house on the property. I had started noticing a decline in my stamina level at this point and driving the fifty miles home some nights seemed like over a hundred and unmanageable. My colleague loaned me a book-on-tape to help the miles go by faster and make the drive less stressful, which sounded like a great idea. It was quickly returned and marked as a failed experiment, when I became so enthralled and distracted by the story that I missed my exit by twenty miles.
I was grateful for the close place to collapse after work, but I did not account for how gloomy and depressing it would be to enter the noiseless, empty two-story house every night. To fill the void and overwhelm the melancholy, as soon as I consumed supper and washed the day down the drain in a hot shower, I would retire to my room and retreat into the pages of my chosen work of fiction. Finally, able to dive back into pleasure reading, I used it to drive the spooks away and to help me relax my tired mind and body. As the words flew off the pages, they formed free picture shows in my mind that drowned out the house’s deafening silence and took me away quicker than a soak in Calgon.
My MS slowly started to crawl out of hibernation and began to saw through the first, and what would become the last, three-years of my tumultuous pharmacy career. I was leaning and relying more heavily on these precious hours of mental escape for stress decompression following my shifts. My one-year residency rolled into eighteen grueling months after two severe relapses. Surprisingly, after all this, the hospital still wanted to hire me upon completion and agreed to let me keep using the drafty house as my rejuvenation station. The afternoon before my shift, I would load my Honda CR-V with a suitcase and a tote of paperbacks, drive over, and use the evening hours to regroup, relax, and read.
Nevertheless, over the next year, the unsettling, accelerated pace of my neurological condition was thrust into the forefront of my mind when I started having trouble traversing the parking lot to my waiting refuge. Stumbling in one evening following a taxing shift, my eyes were too tired to clearly focus on a page, and my brain was too foggy to comprehend one word. I had pushed myself past my system's breaking point, and I painfully realized I could no longer safely perform my pharmacist responsibilities. Heartbreakingly, I made the decision to turn in my badge and house key and drove home for the last time. When I arrived home, it was determined I probably shouldn’t drive anymore either, so I relinquished my car keys as well. Two very weighty volumes of my life had abruptly ended, and the sound of their covers slamming shut reverberated in my ears.
The following repetitive days at home extended into unvaried weeks, and I felt myself slipping farther and farther into a spiral of desolation. Losing my career and vehicular independence at one time was wreaking havoc on me psychologically and making me feel as if I would never get to leave my house or travel freely again. One television show had blurred into hundreds more before my clicking finger decisively froze. I ultimately concluded MS may decrease my faculties in the future, but I would not facilitate this loss by killing brain cells staring into this mindless box. Thankfully, my trusty companions had not strayed far and were patiently waiting for me on the shelves in my library with their ever-ready lifeline.
I climbed out of my self-pity pit and into an endless stream of intellectually stimulating outings and undertakings on a staircase built out of hardbacks. Whether I was learning to play Quidditch and drink butterbeer at Hogwarts, going There and Back Again to Mirkwood forest for A Hobbit’s Holiday, or avoiding REDЯUM at the Overlook Hotel, by losing myself once again between the dedications and the author biographies, I found my tickets out of the isolation. I wasn’t choosy and was grateful for any distraction from dwelling on the changes and losses in my circumstances. My undiscriminating range of literature carried me to numerous rousing locations, nonetheless I always circled back to my preferred genre: Historical Fiction.
Embracing a well written narrative of the past provided me with not only a ticket to travel but also the keys to a DeLorean to reach my destinations. I emphatically stepped into a print lined cavern that would lead me around the globe by way of bifurcations and tunnels. Plantagenets and Tudors; Henrys and Elizabeth; the tales of these English pedigrees directed my journeys through times gone by throughout Europe as royal families were married beyond borders for alliances. Other cave passageways led me to the Czars of Russia, Dynasties of China, and eventually, back across the saltwater. Here, I again rode in a covered wagon, strolled down unpaved streets, and experienced the chaotic growing pains of a baby country trying to form its own identity.
There was a genuine cord of truth running through all these stories, but every author added their own spin to the enthralling narratives. Since my late nights spent with Laura and Scarlett, advances in technology now allowed me to instantaneously unravel the authentic facts from the imaginative fabrications on my phone or laptop. These threads would lead me back to nonfiction collections to further educate myself on the historical details.
Technology had also changed how and where I could enjoy my favorite books. High-tech gadgets had been developed to store a small library of manuscripts on a single device, making the stacks portable, and negating trips to the brick-and-mortar. As I had previously found out, literary compositions were now available in a completely audible format as well. These had returned the joy of the written word back to those previously deprived audiences. I knew eventually I may need to utilize this but preferred to flip my pages for as long as I could.
When my siblings and I were drawn in by the melodic beckoning of A Song of Ice and Fire, we had finally found a series captivating enough to once again entice our three unique tastes and diverse minds. Recommended first by my brother, the books soon had us all addicted, including my mother. Before Hollywood claimed the Iron Throne, the tales of Westeros had been perused and consumed by each of us. We no longer shared the same copy of a book, but we could still share the mythical quest within.
I learned to use a good page-turner to supplement my other new pastime, sitting in doctor’s waiting rooms, as a distraction to the tedious schedule. The problem with this was, however, the nurse always appeared with her clipboard and called my name when I was in the middle of a riveting section. This recurring frustration occasionally made me consider reading one of their mind-numbing, year-old magazines instead, but I quickly banished that thought. My brain was damaging itself enough as is. I needed to try to strengthen it, not add to the injury.
When MS drove my other pastimes away, I barely noticed as my mind and attention were focused on my written getaways and were wandering to places my tired, uncooperative legs couldn’t carry me. Books were taking me to the lands I had dreamt of one day seeing and leaving my footprints on before MS rendered my body almost incapable of travel. I would never be able to physically visit, much less climb, the three hundred sixty-five steps of El Castillo, but I could easily reach it by climbing into the history of Chichén Itzá and the mystery surrounding the Mayans.
My love and draw to written words and the emotions and images they could invoke also inspired me to pursue a new pastime—writing. Books had taken me on so many fantastical journeys, that I wanted to learn to paint the pictures and form the expeditions. One day, I would like to write something that makes younger generations want to stay up past their bedtimes, reading with a flashlight under their covers.
All those years ago in a little house on the Kansas prairie, when my mother began reading my sister and me Little House on the Prairie, she knew she was starting us on a trail to endless explorations, adventures, and discoveries. Our love for reading grew from that nighttime story time. Regardless of how muddled or messy my life had been since then, reading was always playing a central role in helping me grow, succeed, and overcome adversities. My MS may have restricted my movements, but I knew that by opening a front cover, I could unlock a portal into any location or time and the only restriction was the strength of my imagination.
My momma taught me that.
Author: Katie Yusuf
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