‘It felt like a piece of bad news I should pass on to someone else’ – Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on his MS diagnosis

In October 2017 the academic Robert Douglas-Fairhurst went to see a neurologist in Oxford. A couple of months earlier a weird thing had happened: he’d gone on a long walk and ended it shuffling along, like an old man in slippers. He wasn’t yet 50. Having had a scan, he was looking forward to hearing there was nothing to worry about. ‘I’m going to come right out with it,’ the neurologist said, fixing him in the eye. ‘I think you have multiple sclerosis.’

All of us, Douglas-Fairhurst writes in Metamorphosis, his heartening and unexpectedly gripping memoir, find at one point or other that we are standing on a trap-door. If we are lucky it doesn’t open, or we step off it. If we are unlucky it opens. Hearing the diagnosis was his trapdoor moment: ‘There was a break of wood, the sharp click of a sliding bolt, and then nothing but the sensation of rushing air.’

The book records what happened next, from the dizzying weeks after his diagnosis to his life now, or now-ish. But it isn’t, thank God, just the log of someone getting more and more radically unwell. Douglas-Fairhurst intertwines his dispatch from what Susan Sontag called ‘the kingdom of the sick’ with stories of other writers who have passed into it – particularly Bruce Frederick Cummings, the author of The Journal of a Disappointed Man (published under the pseudonym W.N.P. Barbellion), who had MS and died in 1919, at just 30.

Kafka looms large too. When Douglas-Fairhurst was diagnosed, he found a new affinity with the character Gregor Samsa, who turns into a bug overnight. At first, Samsa’s family care for him, and feed him the rotten food he craves. But gradually their support wanes.