First I lost weight, then I lost my voice, and now I've lost Onassis.
I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?
When Dickens arrives in the United States in November of 1867, he's already in questionable health. So by the end of the trip, he was really in failing condition, and really, he would never recover completely after this point, and you could sort of draw a straight line to his ultimate decline and death.
No one can control the aging process or the trajectory of illness.
People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
It started off with flu-like symptoms and pain; then, I started feeling really funny. In two weeks, I was paralyzed from the waist down, and it spiraled down from there. Every ability I had was slowly slipping away.
You feel fine, and then, when your body can't keep fighting, you don't.
The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning.
