A Man And His Ideas

  A collection of Joseph Flanigan's drawings.

Think Outside the Box HERO: The word hero is an acronym that means,  H elp  E veryone,  R espect  O thers. You show respect by giving your time, your talent, your treasure, and most importantly, your tenacity. Never quit until we find the cure for MS. Thank you for coming, each of you is my hero. The current dialog on MS has two principal author perspectives. The clinical view and the MSer self-view, or the "them" or the "me" perspective. When I talk about MS From the Insider-Out, I try to have the "us" perspective.  I just look at MS magazines, the principal authors were from the clinical view. Sometimes, the magazine will have an MSer personal story as the me-too story.   The them pronoun can be a logical context  syllogism when referring to  people with MS as the object of the article. Them, you, us and me are just perspectives of the MS box. The clinical views, them and you, see the MS box from the outside. The MSer views, us and me, is f...

About Me: My MS Story My name is Joseph. In 1989, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Since then, my MSer story has traveled many roads. Today, I will share the story of some of my adventures. I want to thank each of you for being here. Whenever we can come together to hear and discuss MS, I believe each of us receives energy to continue the adventure.  Almost every story has a hero. My story has many. I was born in a small town in central Nebraska. We lived on the old family homestead farm without indoor plumbing or running water; three years later, when we moved to the big house, my mother told my dad she wanted an indoor toilet and water in the house. I can still see dad’s solution: a 50-gallon drum on the roof with a hose piping water from the well and electric cord attached to the stock tank heater keeping the drum’s water from freezing. By the time I was seven, I had three sisters and a brother, and we left the farm and moved to Denver.  Life with MS is like f...

MS fatigue is an MSer's best friend. Connecting to fatigue is one of the hardest MSer challenges. Often without warning, MS fatigue invades activities. Even with life skill management and avoidance techniques, the fatigue monster can find a way to hack into any activity.  This interloper action provides many reasons to consider the fatigue invader an enemy. In systems design, anything that causes a breach in system security is an interloper. As good as any system can possibly be, an interloper demonstrates an opportunity for improving security. An interloper that penetrates enough to cause damage means recovery actions.  While the interloper attack is cursed, the attack triggers  opportunities to make a better system by  improving security and recovery plans. MS fatigue is an interloper attack on our body’s systems. We curse its existence as an enemy to our health. But if we step back and look a   the attack as defining a breached area in the bran due to t...

The Hero In Us and The Hero In Me From August 2014 The Hero In Us by Joseph Flanigan Loveland, Colorado As an Ambassador of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, I have given many talks about MS to groups, organizations, and individuals.    My speech script is about the disease, its diagnoses, its symptoms, and the Society. During the talk, I will weave in personal anecdotes and experiences.   These off-script anecdotes seem to make the most connection to the audience.   I enjoy telling the stories because they reveal some of the real-life challenges and consequences of living with MS. Living with MS is not a script nor is it a story.   In looking for a way to tell about living with multiple sclerosis, I discovered another way to explain the disease and uncovered new insight about how to live with MS. A friend, Brandon Harrington, told me about the 10-step model of a hero's journey often found in the literature. The steps derive from Josep...