In Nancy Mairs’ “On Being a Cripple” she lends us to the extensive view of the life of a person living with MS, and the day to day basis on how her life has changed. According the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is the most common disabling neurological disease of young adults. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neuroinflammatory disease that affects myelin , a substance that makes up the membrane (called the myelin sheath) that wraps around nerve fibers (axons). Mrs. Mairs’ life has been changed to the point where her daily life is impacted by her disease, but not to the point where she allows the disease to define her life. She still tries to do daily activities and has adjusted her disability. She herself doesn’t say that her life is nothing but worry-free. but she does say that if anyone should be well adjusted to having MS, it’d be her. Her essay brings up a lot of points about being disabled, from the linguistics of identifying disabled people to how …show more content…
Mairs describes to her readers what Multiple Sclerosis is and what is affected in the human body. Along with loss of hearing, vision, speech, ability to walk, chronic pain, and coordination just to name a few, Mairs also attributes that MS can cause to a loss of humor. She claims this loss of ability is the easiest to lose with the disease, but also the hardest to live without, which is an interesting claim. She supports her claim a bit later in her piece. Before this, though, she goes in between talking about her normal life with MS and the unfortunate effects that MS has had on her life. Going between “I lead, on the whole, an ordinary life, probably rather like the one I would have led had I not had MS.” (Mairs) and “I will never run again, except in dreams, and one day I may have to write that f will never walk again.”