People With MS With the Courage to Give

Book excerpt: The first story in this book is Jackie Waldman's own -- the self-described charmed life -- until July of 1991, when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It took years, but eventually she came to understand that a person with MS is only part of who she is. Since her diagnosis she's done a number of things, including publish the Courage to Give series. In this most recent addition to the series, Waldman has collected stories of 24 men and women living with MS, who have extraordinary lives, who've gone way beyond slogging through every day, who've found the courage to do new things or old things in new ways, to make the lives of those around them -- sometimes tens of thousands of those around them -- so much better. In these pages, you'll meet Alicia Conill, an M.D. who continued her medical practice for as long as she could, and then founded a revolutionary course called The Disability Experience, so that health care workers know what it's like to live with disability. You'll also meet Anthony Zaremba, who almost lost his job when his employees thought his shaking hands meant he was drunk or on drugs. His work is with community gardens and making one in Brooklyn wheelchair accessible. There's Loia Feuchter, who started a knitting circle that does philanthropic knitting. There's Dwight Riskey, a senior VP of Frito Lay, who organized a big team to raise money for MS. There's David L. Lander, better known as Squiggy from "Laverne and Shirley," who hid his disease for years. But now he's an Ambassador for the National MS Society.