The last time my husband and I were to go away on a vacation was to celebrate my 50th birthday in Tuscany 7 years ago. I was already very unstable in my capacity to walk and even sit for any length of time, but I was determined to go before any trip would become impossible. We were in touch with an international organization that supplied wheelchairs for free and arranged to have one available for me when we landed at the airport in Italy. Unfortunately for us, our departure date was September 13th 2001. Our flights were canceled after the tragedy of 9/11 struck and we had clients in Manhattan to counsel and simply wanted to remain on the same continent as our daughters. So we never went. And indeed, my symptoms subsequently became so bad that the pleasure of planning of that aborted trip was the only vacation we ever expected to have again.
Imagine my delight when we were recently invited to come to the French Alps to visit old dear Dutch friends of ours at their vacation home in the tiny village of St. Nicolas La Chapelle. And we went! And I had a wonderful time. I wasn’t exactly hiking up Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe visible from their house, but we took the gondola up to the top of the glacier (brown Saharan desert sands deposited by winds on the vast white expanse) and over the top onto the Italian side. We drove through the tunnel of Mont Blanc to the Val D’Aosta in Italy to the small village of Brussons where my maternal grandfather grew up. There my distant cousin Agnesi met us. She showed us his house where we ate raspberries and picked roses in his old overgrown garden. Returning to France, we went to several mountaintop farmhouse restaurants that crested the top of every mountain around Flumet, home of one grueling leg of the Tour de France, visited the medieval town of Annency with its picturesque canals, enjoyed the farmer’s market of Sallanches, and swam in the local spring fed mountain lake.
Because my hostess translated many recipes from our book into European equivalents, my stay was a very healthful one. The Europeans are no strangers to the ideas of ‘gluten free’ and I discovered that I could eat the local goat cheese and ‘Omega bread’ baked in the local bakery with no ill effect every other day. (I still observe moderation and rotation whenever I can!) At the end of our visit, a German guest of the downstairs neighbor borrowed our book and read it cover to cover in 1 day. She loved it, and is hoping to get a medical publisher friend of hers to do the legal footwork necessary to have it translated into German.
So I share this to say- the idea of recovery is still not a reality in the minds of many with MS. I am still not as strong as I hope to be one day. But the fact that I could make the long flight, navigate airports, and enjoy the spectacular Presence of the Alps, is further proof that healing is possible, and delayed dreams can yet become fulfilled for us all, wherever we reside.