I USED TO BE AN ARTIST BEFORE DISEASE TOOK IT AWAY

I used to be an artist. Multiple sclerosis took it away over twenty years ago. During a remission in the early 1990s, I was able to briefly draw once again. I went into a frenzy of pencil sketches, drawing faces of people for my last limited print series. I called the series MADE IN THE IMAGE. The images were not meant to be anybody in particular but merely a celebration of humanity. And then the MS returned. For the next 25 years, the disease unrelentingly ravaged my body with a creeping paralysis of my right arm and hand (I'm right-handed) and both legs, putting me in an electric wheelchair. 

Below are five of the six sketches in a series I called "Made In the Image". The first sketch below (left): The face of a young girl after losing a soft-ball game. I called it "We lost, but they cheated". Below (right) was a hot little boy in the neighborhood playing on a sweltering July day. I called him "Kool-Aid Kid".  















Family is a common thread of humanity everywhere. I sketched a rural Chinese grandfather's joy (below left) to see his granddaughter dance (below right)





Living in western Canada, I had to add a sketch of a young rancher.

In 2018, after 34 years with the aggressive disease, I was in advanced end-stage disease. The expectation was that my next address would be either a nursing home or a cemetery. My MS was too advanced: It had done too much damage.  My brain and brainstem were riddled with plaque scars (the scler in multiple sclerosis), there was no hope of remission. My body was too damaged for that to happen. I had not experienced one in a quarter of a century. I was in a full electric wheelchair and I accepted my fate. 

Then something extraordinary happened. One evening in the summer of 2018, I was spending time before the Blessed Sacrament in Eucharistic adoration. I asked Jesus if He could let me