To Get Back Home is a medical thriller of the first order, a true story of triumph and survival over astronomical odds, as an otherwise healthy and active young woman fights for her life after being suddenly stricken by a rare neurological disorder, Acute Demyelinating Encephalomyelitis (ADEM). To Get Back Home takes you on a harrowing journey as Ms. Ford forges her way back from a coma and quadriplegia, desperate to return to her family and young children. Her life seemed perfect until Wendy Ford was stricken and rendered comatose within days, and then, after a tense weeks-long battle for survival, quadriplegic. At one of the most renowned hospitals in the world, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, the Harvard teaching hospital known as "Harvard with a heart," her doctors Harvard Medical School professors all were helpless to diagnose and treat her, hard as they tried, as the rare malady confounded even them and she slipped further and further away. Initially, she was not expected to live, or, ultimately, to walk again or recover her prior intellectual abilities. Doctors have referred to hers as a miracle case, but the mysteries persist to this day.
"An engaging, moving memoir that unravels at a quick pace. Straightforward and honest, emotional realism is achieved with quiet dignity, making it all the more poignant..."
-Kate Darnton, Contributing Editor,
PublicAffairs
"Impeccably done and so fascinating. Sometimes you read something that's really important and you have to at least try to get it out there..."
-Philip Spitzer, Literary Agent, NY, NY
"A poignant narrative...I was spellbound. You are a role model for your life-affirming persistence..."
-Weston Boer, Writer and Historian
"Immensely valuable to anyone in the clergy as they help people through dire straits."
-The Rev. Susan Flanders, Chevy Chase, MD
"Very moved by your manuscript, which I read from cover to cover, at once...Remarkable..."
-Diana Barrett, Harvard Business School
"Your very desire to live and not die was itself a kind of prayer."
-Professor Kimberley Patton, Harvard Divinity School"