From the depths, hope!

At a time of one of the worst depression episodes in my life, a ray of sunshine came through my art program which I had been ignoring for months. The best way I found out of depression was finding something I could do and listening to music. The worst thing I found was the constant churning of extremely selfish irrational thoughts during my depression, so breaking that cycle brought back happiness!

Extract;
....I needed to do something else to cheer me up; to let the happiness back into my
life like a ray of sunshine. Remembering that I still had Corel Painter IX sitting on my laptop, I decided to fire it up and put all my feelings down in paint. The first images were just abstract sloshes of oil paint smeared on a white background. It was quite liberating...

There's more to hope than just keeping occupied and will power, there's a hidden dimension to it and the whole world will see that soon. Read about my relatively recent life in my book, DMD LIFE ART & ME, available in ebook and paperback versions here; http://duchennemen.net16.net/buymybook.html


Foreword

I’m Ian Griffiths from South Wales. This book is a story of my life so far up to the age of twenty five years. I live with and suffer from the ill effects of DMD which stands for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. It is a severe muscle wasting disease and a life limiting terminal illness. It won’t kill you in six months in the traditional sense of ‘terminal’, but it’s far crueller than that, it steals every muscle in your body first and then kills you, anywhere up to the age of thirty. There have been cases of men living past that into their forties and fifties but only with drastic interventions such as ventilators and tracheotomies, more on this can be found by reading on.
I hope to cover a few things in this book, from a history of my childhood years to a more detailed history from sixteen years onwards and finally onto my current problems and triumphs. At times things I write may make you smile or may make you pause and think about the seriousness of life with this devastating disease. I really hope there will be a cure but currently for us supposedly ‘older’ guys with DMD (over twenty one), there seems very little hope. If I don’t see a cure in my lifetime, I hope my campaigning helps in some way bring it about for future generations, so another child won’t have to see their body wither and die before their time.