Too Many Reasons to Live by Rob Burrow

Author:Rob Burrow [Burrow, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Sports, Personal Memoirs, Sports & Recreation, Rugby
ISBN: 9781529073270
Google: tC8WEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2021-08-19T23:46:19.843915+00:00

8

YOU CAN SPEND ALL DAY WATCHING THE NEWS AND arguing on social media, but that’s not likely to make you very happy. In fact, it’s likely to make you sad and angry. So why do it, when goodness is everywhere?

I’m not sure being diagnosed with a terminal disease made me realize that, but it certainly hammered the point home. Every morning you wake up, you’ve got a choice: you can spend your day soaking up everything that’s bad about the world, while bitching and moaning, or you can block all that out and do stuff that makes you content. You haven’t got long in this world, so why waste time having a row with someone you don’t even know on Twitter?

People seem to think that the world is going to hell in a handcart. Maybe it is, but you don’t have to let all the nastiness rule your life. There are still so many lovely people wanting to do nice things. I know this because I’ve been wallowing in the niceness of others since telling the world about my MND. Believe it or not, some of the nicest people I know are journalists. Strange, right? Because everyone seems to think they’re bastards. Well, not the ones I’ve met, at least since I took Doddie’s advice and started telling my story.

Me and Lindsey never had a proper sit-down chat about whether we should open ourselves up to the media and invite the public in, it just kind of happened. And it all started with a meeting between me, Doddie and the former footballer Stephen Darby, which was broadcast by BBC Breakfast.

Stephen, who started out at Liverpool and played almost 200 games for Bradford City (which I don’t hold against him), was diagnosed with MND while he was still at Notts County. He was only twenty-nine, but his positivity is astonishing. And apart from Doddie’s trousers, that was a beautiful little film. It was only ten minutes long but packed a lot in. In fact, the BBC should have called it ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About MND But Were Afraid to Ask’. It was like a very cosy public health advert: three pretty average blokes – a Yorkshireman, a Scouser and a mad Scottish giraffe – shedding light on a horrible disease that was previously a mystery to most people.

Our interviewer, the lovely Sally Nugent, did a great job of teasing everything out of us. As she said at the start, men aren’t usually great at talking about illness or feelings. But it was all on show that day. We discussed the devastation of being diagnosed and how difficult it was to tell our families (Stephen had only just got married when he was diagnosed, while Doddie had a wife and three teenage sons). And because Doddie was a few years further down the line, he was able to fill us in on what was to come, the mundane nuts and bolts of living with MND, as well as the challenges and the indignities.

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