Blog: The elemental importance of health, at least to me.

When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me there was nothing more important than health. Despite many colds, broken bones, and even when I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 23, I couldn’t see why he stressed this point so vehemently.

The fact was that I never understood the elemental importance of health until I was a lot older and had seen a lot more of life.

Call it sheltered, blessed, or lucky, I never felt that weight up close - even partially - until I began a family of my own. It wasn’t until I met my future wife that, through her eyes, experience, and deep character, did I get an inkling of the stakes. She tragically was first exposed to this as a teenager, gaining an insight that took me decades longer.

While still in high school, she and her two siblings had to live the nightmare of losing their mother to a rare and aggressive breast cancer. Losing a mother (not to mention a spouse) is hard at any age.  Going through that before you have even turned 16 must have been especially cruel. It goes without saying that losing any life to any cause that is far more survivable today just adds to the staggering weight of the loss.

As my wife and I began to make life plans, including those for any children, we needed to know how my MS should be factored in. We learned that there is not a specific “MS gene” that gets passed down. What we did learn is that there is a higher chance of MS for our children. For any child born to a parent with MS, their chances of an MS diagnosis sometime in their lives are about 1 in 67.  Compared to 1 in 1,000 for the general population.

Those numbers didn’t bring great comfort to these prospective new parents. Certainly not to my wife, who would have put her babies in bubble wrap onesies if there was such a thing.

With MS in the picture, we rested easier knowing how far medicine had come in just a few short years. There were a dozen different disease-modifying treatments that slow, alter, or significantly halt the progression of this incurable condition. Compare that to when I was diagnosed ten years earlier, there were none. Thanks to hard-working researchers and doctors that relentlessly pursued solutions, we can be confident that in the low-probability event that one of our children becomes affected, there are a multitude of effective options available to them. And as long as the ecosystem of cures remains, more are on the way. 

The journey I’ve lived has woken me up to the importance of health and the hope we all need. So when I saw how price controls contained in recently signed legislation will threaten continued innovation, I wondered why anyone would take such a risk. Why mess with a system that is about as close to a miracle machine (albeit imperfect) as we’ve ever seen?

Replace a system that’s proven effective with an experiment that has never worked? That’s why I founded Survivors for Solutions, to raise a rational voice before hope is lost.

The hope for a chance to be well, to slow sickness, let mothers love a little longer, or let kids get a chance at life is fundamental. 

It’s not an entitlement or owed to us, but deserves to be strenuously safeguarded and not ignorantly forfeited.

Our country’s pipeline of cures is a result of the hard work of dedicated scientists and a spirit that says we can do big things “not because they are easy but because they are hard.”

Let’s not ever lose hope.

-CZ