Becca Schwartz, a senior
sociology major, didn't think much of her photography project at first. A
self-described “lousy photographer,” she thought the photos in her
“love-hate” project were simply “pictures of me and my life with a
disease.”
But Prof. Martin Benjamin saw something more, and urged her to write some
stream-of-consciousness narratives to go with each photo. In just of few minutes of
writing, Schwartz's project had become the perfect emotional outlet for all the
feelings she had about her life with Multiple Sclerosis.
“As Becca was showing me her work and started to talk about it, she was saying
these really great things,” Benjamin recalled. “She was saying all that she
thought she couldn't say. It turned out to be very therapeutic for her.”
The book – composed entirely of self-portraits — opens with a picture of
Schwartz in sunglasses, writhing in agony. “When I first got sick, my eyes got real
bad and I had to wear sunglasses everywhere,” writes Schwartz. “These are the
same sunglasses that I wore – they are a reminder to me of my first
'meeting' with MS.”
On another page with a photo of syringes, bottles of medication and a copy of Harold
Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People, “Sometimes I feel like
this is my life, all these pills … when things get bad, I need to numb myself, and
have plenty to do it with. It's like I'm being overtaken by this disease …
it's so much bigger than I am.”
And on a page with a photo of Schwartz injecting herself with medication, “This
one makes people cringe … I do it once a week. The first few weeks I couldn't
even look when I did it. I've gotten a little bit better.”
“When people look at the book, they find it disturbing and dark, but this is me
when I'm sick or injecting myself,” she said. “I didn't realize how
powerful it was until people looked at it and told me. I guess that's because
it's so 'normal' to me. My book also gives me something to show people,
'look, here is my MS book.' Maybe it will help them understand about illness
better.”
Multiple sclerosis is a chronic, often disabling disease of the central nervous system
caused by lesions in the myelin sheath that coats nerve fibers. Symptoms may be mild and
recurring such as numbness in the limbs (as in Schwartz's case) or severe —
paralysis or loss of vision. Nationwide, there are an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 people
with MS, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
Besides “Becca's Little Multiple Sclerosis Book,” she has made MS the
theme of her senior thesis in sociology, specifically what MS means to people her age. She
has searched the World Wide Web and other resources to find other people her age with MS.
“I have learned a lot more about the disease both medically and more importantly,
psychologically,” she says. “Also, I have contacted other college-age people all
over the world with MS, which is the best therapy possible, to e-mail people who actually
understand what you are going through.”