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NMH Magazine : Fall 2003

The Best Medicine

by Mary Seymour Photograph by Edward McCain

When MaryAnn Purnell Christy ’68 used to do stand-up comedy, silence would greet her arrival onstage. She needed two canes to get to the microphone, and once there, she’d settle into a chair. By the time she spoke, the audience was puzzled and somewhat alarmed.

“You might wonder why I’m sitting down doing stand-up,” she’d say. “I have multiple sclerosis and it’s not contagious. You don’t have to move away.”

Her comedy teacher had taught her: Hit people in the face with your disability. Be obvious that you’re joking about yourself, and then they can laugh.

“The worst thing about having MS is the stuff you have to do—like getting hand controls. The trouble with hand controls is they impair your expressiveness to other drivers. You can no longer give people the finger. Instead you have to honk your horn and snarl.”

They laughed, not in a knee-slapping way, but in a chuckle-chortle sort of way. And it felt good to Christy—good to be challenging herself in new ways, good to face her disability head on, good to create positive energy.

Because you’ve got to laugh, she’d learned. 

 

You’ve got to laugh.

Christy has received two seismic shocks in her life: losing her management career at AT&T and being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Losing her job, she says, was the worse of the two.

She’d been a wonder woman at AT&T, receiving an unprecedented four promotions in eight years, rising from service consultant to district marketing manager. And she’d loved every minute of it. AT&T had supported her, challenged her, and rewarded her well. It had been her life.

The job had gone less well, however, when she was transferred from Seattle to Philadelphia in 1984. She missed the old team and the west coast environment. Meanwhile, little things had started going wrong with Christy physically. She’d be taking notes during a meeting and her right hand would go numb, causing her to drop her pen without even realizing it. She checked herself into the hospital for testing, but they didn’t find anything tangibly wrong. She returned to work but continued to feel stressed and out of sorts.

In October 1986, Christy got the devastating news: AT&T was downsizing its workforce and she’d be a casualty. For the next five days, she couldn’t hear anything. She could see people’s lips moving, but no sound seemed to come out.

Soon after her layoff, Christy was offered a district manager’s job at Wang Laboratories; she started her new job in November. Her symptoms worsened and she lost a chunk of her eyesight. In February 1987 she went back to her doctor, who said, “Uh- oh, it’s MRI time.”

When the test results came back, Christy’s doctor called her into the office at lunchtime. He told her the MRI results indicated she had multiple sclerosis. She wasn’t particularly surprised—when she’d gone into the hospital the year before, the doctors had leaned toward that diagnosis.

“We don’t know the cause or cure,” her doctor told her, “but let me give you two numbers. Here’s the number for the local MS society, and here’s a number for when you need your wheelchair.”

Christy thanked him, went home and cried in her kitchen for 20 minutes, then called her husband and asked him to come home. “I’m glad you came,” she told him when he arrived. “Now I’ve got to get back to work.”

It took five years before the grief and anger and depression fully subsided. Five years in which Christy left her job at Wang, went on disability, and became increasingly incapacitated. To get herself out of the house, she attended a few classes at Temple University law school. She began to do volunteer work, serving on the Philadelphia Mayor’s Commission on People with Disabilities, getting involved with Big Sisters, and working as a docent at the Philadelphia zoo.

Christy’s marriage suffered during those first five years. She and her husband, David, had met in 1984 and married two years later, when she was already showing symptoms of MS. Nervous about her physical condition, unwilling to be a burden, Christy had done her best to talk him out of marriage. “Don’t you want to get a newer model?” she’d asked.

He didn’t.

“Why don’t you just leave?” she asked David repeatedly in those early years after her diagnosis, when she became ataxic, which made her weave and wobble like a drunk woman. She hated what her body was doing to her—but imposing the situation on the man she loved was far, far worse. She felt it would have been easier to be alone. But David never once—not for a second—expressed the desire to leave.

When Christy needed strength, she thought of her mother, who’d contracted German measles early in her pregnancy with her second daughter, born six years before MaryAnn. The baby, Barbara, was born blind and deaf and had deformed feet and congenital heart defects. She’d lived for nine years under her mother’s arduous and ardent care. After Barbara died in 1953, Mrs. Purnell had begun teaching part-time, eventually becoming director of UMass’s general phys ed program.

Given her maternal role model, Christy wasn’t about to fold. She went off her medications—including Prednisone, a synthetic steroid—which helped relieve the severe depression she’d slipped into. She did some talk therapy. And she decided her education and professional experience must have happened for a reason. Some extraordinary opportunity was waiting for her somewhere down the line. She wanted to be ready when the time came.

To remind herself to laugh, Christy took a continuing ed course in stand-up comedy. Her instructor owned a comedy club in Philadelphia; students in his class had to do a five-minute act at his club in order to graduate. She did so well that he invited her to take an advanced course in stand-up. She and a group of students began doing comedy at various clubs in Philly. She always ended her act with the same words: “I just want you to remember—yesterday’s history and tomorrow’s mystery, but today is a gift. That’s why they call this the present.” 

In 1998 David and MaryAnn moved to Tucson, eager for a warmer climate and a change of place. David quickly got a job in his chosen field, court stenography. MaryAnn, determined not to sit in the house all day, looked through the volunteer section of the newspaper and found an animal clinic that was looking for help.

At the time, Christy wasn’t sure what her body held in store: losing bladder and bowel control is a common occurrence in MS patients. She reasoned that if that happened, an animal shelter was the perfect place to be. No one would know whether the smells came from her or the animals.

Christy started volunteering at Pima Animal Control, first working in the kennel to help people adopt dogs. Before long she was a fixture at the center, zipping around in her scooter. She formed a nonprofit corporation, Friends of Pima Animal Control, to support the clinic; she also established a charitable foundation on its behalf. Currently she works as volunteer coordinator, devoting two days a week to the job.

When they were married, David and MaryAnn had hoped to have children someday. After her diagnosis, MaryAnn’s doctor told her that people with MS usually do fine during pregnancy, although there could be postpregnancy exacerbations. She decided to take the risk; about three years after her diagnosis, at the age of 40, she went to the doctor to make sure she was okay to have a baby. He did an exam and said, “My dear, you’re menopausal.”

It was another loss—but, in typical fashion, she simply went a different route. In Tucson, the Christys became part of the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. Together they became a Big Couple to a little boy—seven when they started working with him, now 11—whose father is out of the picture and whose mother is diabetic and frequently unemployed. Zack spends time with the Christys every week and sleeps at their house at least once a month.

In 2001 Christy received the Tucson Citizen of the Year Award for her volunteer work. She’d been living in Tucson for just three years.

Christy’s income stems from a disability policy dating back to her days at Wang. The policy has been sold about five times in the last 17 years. Each time it’s sold, the insurance company picking it up reviews her situation. That means more MRIs, more neurology appointments, more reminders of what she is—and isn’t.

“Am I disabled?” Christy asks. “Yes, in some ways I am. But give me a telephone and a credit card and the world is mine.”

She treasures her independence and has an automatic lift in her car that allows her to load and unload her scooter. When people offer help of any kind, she bristles. The first time she politely says, “No, thank you.” By the third iteration, all bets are off. “Do I look like this is new to me?” she’ll ask, showing traces of her stand-up days.

MS doesn’t run in Christy’s family; according to doctors, there’s no hereditary component to multiple sclerosis anyway. She doesn’t spend time thinking about the whys and hows of her condition. Instead she views her future with optimism. “I can’t not,” she says simply.

Her neurologists are baffled that she’s not in worse shape after 16 years of MS, with no drug therapy for most of that time. Whatever is keeping her disorder on hold, Christy believes in it. She believes in spontaneous remission too.
But she’s not sitting around and waiting for miracles either. To illustrate that point, she offers a favorite quote by author Bruce Barton:

Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dare to believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.

Then she embellishes it ever so slightly. “And I do believe that something inside me is superior to my circumstance.”