The professor of English literature on the shock of being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the books he turned to, and the more unexpected ways his life has been transformed
In his new book, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst likens his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2017 to the opening of a trapdoor on which he unfortunately happened to be standing “like Wile E Coyote” at the precise moment when the lever operating it was pulled. On that day, a neurologist briskly explained to him that his recent MRI scan had revealed the existence of lesions on his spine and brain that were almost certainly the result of MS, and in that moment – whoosh! – down he plummeted. “There was,” he writes, “a creak of wood, the sharp click of a sliding bolt, and then nothing but the sensation of rushing air.” His symptoms – the struggle to get out of a hot bath; the feeling, after a long walk, that his legs could no longer carry him – had hitherto been more bothersome than distressing or painful. But now he began to see them as part of a sinister jigsaw: a fiendish puzzle that would, he soon gathered, forever remain unsolvable.
Still, he wasn’t about to give up: then, or now. In his lovely, book-lined room in Magdalen College, Oxford – open a window, and you may hear the sound of a deer coughing in the mist – Douglas-Fairhurst, a fiftysomething professor of English whose studies of Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens have won literary prizes, and who has acted as the historical consultant on, among other productions, the TV series Dickensian and the Enola Holmes films, gamely waves an ankle at me. “Feel my knee!” he instructs. “Go on! Feel it.”
