What You Wish For

by Paul Blacklow and Rebecca Hayter, Blacklow Educational Trust, 208 pages, $34.99.

When you're reading a book and you already know the ending, what keeps you turning the pages?

In Paul Blacklow's What You Wish For, it's several things. It's the graphic story of how incurable disease affects him. It's the urge to find out how long he can hang on. It's the journey through his discoveries in Western and alternative medicine. And it's his relationship with his wife, children, friends and family as he struggles with, and eventually succumbs to, motor neuron disease.

Blacklow was ordinary. The 30-year-old Christchurch massage therapist was newly married and working with some of New Zealand's top athletes when in 2002 he was diagnosed with motor neuron disease and given five years to live.

MND is a disease where nerves become sick and die prematurely, leaving the body wasting away while the mind remains sharp.

But Blacklow, who "ran his illness like a business", as his sister and transcriber Erelyn Ross put it, approaches MND as a challenge rather than a sentence, and starts to explore every possible treatment in Western and alternative medicine.

In one sense, this is intended as a "guidebook" for those suffering terminal illness.

He dictated much of the book throughout his illness before dying on March 11, 2007, aged 35.

The book includes comment and stories from all those affected by his disease, including his therapists. Though the jumping viewpoints can be confusing, it's a novel way to tell a story.

What You Wish For asks you for a different point of view on the spiritual, mental and medical aspects of life and disease. None of us knows if there is a genetic timebomb ticking inside us, or if a sudden injury will change our life completely. This family's struggle makes you think that with support, it is possible to not only survive the unthinkable, but to find it enriching.

"I wouldn't want to go back to what I was ... I certainly have different priorities," writes Blacklow's wife Julianne, someone for whom we might ordinarily feel sorry.

"I'm a lot more accepting of people and their ideas ... I think enjoying life and trying to live for the moment is the most important thing, and I look at people caught up in the rat race or scowling mothers at the supermarket and think, `Oh God, I'm so pleased I'm not living that life'."

• Naomi Arnold is a reporter for The Nelson Mail.

- © Fairfax NZ News