Four years ago, author Richard M. Cohen wrote Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness … A Reluctant Memoir (HaperCollins 2005). It’s a vivid account of Cohen’s struggle with multiple sclerosis and colon cancer, and it was a best-seller. Wherever Cohen went to speak, hundreds of people showed up, many of them in wheelchairs, using canes, and wanting to share their own experiences of life with chronic illness.

“I realized that there are a lot of people out there with chronic illness who want to touch and be touched by other people,” Cohen said recently during an interview with Health Monitor.

Cohen’s second book, Strong At the Broken Places: Voices of Illness, A Chorus of Hope (HarperCollins 2008), profiles five people who are also struggling with chronic disease.

You’re not alone
Ninety million Americans battle chronic illness every day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Eighty percent of people over 65 have one chronic illness; 50% in that age range have two. Cohen says chronic illness is in most everyone’s future. That’s why he wanted to write this book.

“No matter what kind of family you have or what kind of support you have around you, there’s a quality to being sick that makes you feel alone,” he says. “People want to know that there are others who feel the same way they do.”

“My conclusion—what I learned from researching this book—is that people are much stronger than they think they are,” he adds. “How often have you overheard someone being told about an illness and they say, ‘I could never deal with that’?

“How do they know? Until you are tested and have to deal with the situation, you don’t know what you can do. You sell yourself short. Most people have a reservoir of resilience. When you’re called to deal with that, then you learn.”

A “reservoir of resilience” is what Cohen describes again and again in his stories of the five lives highlighted in his book. There is Buzz Bay, a man living with cancer. There also is Denise Glass, a strong and dignified woman dealing with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease); Ben Cumbo, a college student with muscular dystrophy; Sarah Levin, a young woman with Crohn’s disease, and Larry Fricks, a man fighting to live with stability despite being affected by bipolar disorder.

The people profiled by Cohen seem heroic in their efforts to live sometimes-difficult lives. But they’re not heroes, Cohen says. “There are no merit badges for coping,” he says, “I can see why people would want to call them heroes, but if you told that to these people, they would laugh at you. They wouldn’t get the question. They are just people living their lives. It’s what we do.”