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		Healthy as a (nearly dead) Horse
In 1993 while we were visiting Isle Royale National Park, I had symptoms emerge that were eventually diagnosed as Multiple Sclerosis.  At the time I had numbness and weakness  throughout the left side of my body. It gradually improved over the next two months, and I regained most of my flexibility with massage and exercise.   I have the chronic symptoms of MS - fatigue, heat sensitivity, occasional numbness, clumsiness and reduced vitality, but the disease has been progressing very slowly.  I am now on a handful of medications to manage symptoms, something I didn't need for many years, and also take a daily injection of Copaxone to reduce the diseases progression. In November, 1998, I discovered that some of the symptoms I attributed to MS were caused by heart disease.  It seems that I have had significant heart disease for some time, worsened by the reduced activity I had learned as a way to reduce the MS fatigue.  After a stress test and cardiac catheterization in November, 1998 we discovered that three small vessels on the heart are blocked and other vessels are as much as 75% occluded.  A second cardiac catheterization in December of 2000 and a third in March of 2006  suggest  that the low fat diet and exercise (which more recently has become sporadic due to MS fatigue) regimine I've been following has managed to arrest the progression of this disease.   Who knows what is next?  I won't attempt to predict. I am, however, very optimistic.  The diet and exercise have actually reversed heart disease in some people, and there is no reason I can't be one of them.  The MS has progressed very slowly.  Many people with MS continue to have only modest impairments.  There is no reason I can't be one of these people either.  In the mean time, my empathy for my patients keeps going up, my lifestyle gets healthier and we still have indoor plumbing.  What more could one ask?