Madam, – Simon Fitzmaurice’s moving account (HEALTHplus, April 12) of transitioning to artificial ventilation with motor neurone disease was deeply moving and should become required reading for students, trainees and practitioners in the healthcare professions.
The vivid assertion of vitality in the face of progressive neurodegenerative disease is telling, and although perhaps counter-intuitive to the general public, represents the reality that most of us dealing with neurological disease encounter every day.
His article also prompts those of us in the clinical neurosciences to continue to work to remove the fear of funding for such interventions for what are relatively small numbers of people. The Irish State can spend many hundreds of thousands of euros on a single admission for a patient with cancer without anybody blinking an eyelid. A similar position must be developed for those with neurological illness so that they do not feel in any way beholden for equally sophisticated treatments.
If, as Marguerite Duras wrote, the impossible of today is the history of tomorrow, perhaps we can rephrase this in terms of the remarkable movie The Princess Bride, so effectively used in Fitzmaurice’s narrative. In an Ireland better attuned to supporting those with illnesses of the nervous system, the leitmotif for treatment should transform from Vizzini’s “Inconceivable!” to Westley’s “As you wish”. – Yours, etc,