Echo Woman
The long road home
Chemistry professor and forensics expert Susan Parry explains how her second novel was delayed after she was struck down with a
debilitating illness which paralysed her from the neck down. She tells Julia Breen about her fight back from the rare condition
THE doctor's orders were to
stay in bed and Susan Parry
reluctantly listened.
She'd
been suffering from a mysterious
virus for a week and
was thoroughly fed up, not the type to
take to her bed at the hint of an illness.
"I was feeling really, really rough," she
says. "I was in bed, but got up to go to the
bathroom - and my legs just collapsed.
Within 24 hours, all feeling had gone
from the neck down."
Susan, a professor of analytical chemistry
at Imperial College London, had
been on a high; her first novel, Corpse
Way, had been published a few weeks before.
Now she found herself lying on the
floor of her Surrey home, unable to get
up.
She eventually managed to drag herself
back into bed. "I was strangely
calm," she says. "I thought my husband
will be home in a few hours, I will ask
him what is wrong', and I just lay there,
waiting for him to come back."
Susan was admitted to hospital
straight away by a sharp-eyed doctor,
who suspected what was wrong and
wrote on her notes: "Possible Guillain
Barre Syndrome". She was diagnosed
with the auto-immune disease - which
she describes as being like MS but reversible
- and spent six months in hospital.
The first seven weeks were spent
in intensive care on a ventilator as her
lungs were affected.
SLOWLY, after being given doses of
immunoglobulin, weeks later she
began to regain some movement
in her arms. "It was a long haul then,"
she says. "I had to learn to walk again. I
had no strength at all as my muscles had
completely gone and I was in a rehab
unit in a little cottage hospital for six
months."
The slow process of learning to walk,
brush her teeth, even use a knife and
fork again, had begun. Once Susan was
able to move into a wheelchair, the intensive
physiotherapy started.
"It was just like in a Hollywood film,"
she says. "They hauled me up to these
bars and I had to walk along them. They
would ask me to climb two steps, and I
would only manage one, and they said
that was great. But I was so confused because
I felt I'd failed and I should have
been able to climb two."
Susan wasn't even able to work on her
novels while she was ill. "I couldn't even
hold a book and listening to music was
difficult. For a long time I wasn't able to
do very much. I became totally institutionalised,"
she says.
"I even had to learn how to use a knife
and fork again, like a baby, because the
grip wasn't there. It was a problem in the
connection between the brain and the
limbs."
It would be another year before Susan
was able to visit her beloved second
home, a farmhouse in Swaledale, as she
was unable to climb stairs or walk on uneven
ground.
When she left the rehab unit in March
2006 she could walk with two sticks and
her recovery since then has been remarkable,
helped by one-to-one Pilates
classes, which built up her strength.
The only evidence of the disease is a
small lack of feeling in her toes and she
is now able to walk seven or eight miles
in the Yorkshire Dales again.
She says: "At first balance was a problem
and it was hard to walk in uneven
fields. It feels like very hard work, but
that's because your brain is having to
work so hard."
Susan has just published her second
novel, Death Cart, which, like her first,
is based in the Dales. Death Cart follows
Millie, a student archaeologist working
on a chariot burial in Wensleydale, who
finds herself caught up in a modern-day
mystery.
"I have always been very interested in
crime novels," she says. "It is like compiling
a crossword. All the different
parts have to tie in and you have to develop
elements of surprise. My favourite
writers are PD James and Ruth Rendell,
but when I'm writing I try not to read
crime novels in case I subconsciously
pick up the plots."
She writes very scientifically, with a
spreadsheet monitoring her aim of writing
500 words a day and another spreadsheet
showing timelines and what her
characters are doing at different points
in the novel.
Her novels also draw on some of the
real-life cases she has worked on. Susan
is an expert in the field of forensics and
environmental science and has done a
lot of consultancy work with her colleague,
Professor Kim Jarvis.
She worked on the high-profile
Chohan case several years ago and her
evidence about matching soil samples
was part of the case which convicted
gangland boss Kenneth Regan and his
two accomplices for the brutal murders
of the entire Chohan family, including
an eight-week-old baby.
Her techniques have also helped authenticate
the date of paintings by
analysing paint samples, including a
work ascribed to Leonardo Da Vinci, entitled
the Holy Infants.
Susan's farmhouse in Swaledale is
perched on the side of a hill above Low
Row, with sheep grazing in a neighbouring
paddock. She spends as much
time as her busy schedule allows up here
and has plans to retire to Swaledale.
Her books have been published
through her own publishing company,
Viridian, which also publishes her academic
texts.
"We set up the company to publish an
academic text in paperback and were
surprised how straightforward the
process was. I then admitted to my colleague
that I had written a novel and she
said we should publish it," says Susan.
"The local shops were very supportive
of the first book and Ottakars had it on
a stand as I was a local author, but unfortunately,
now they are Waterstones,
they are no longer able to do that.
"It would be nice if my books encouraged
people to visit the Yorkshire Dales.
Swaledale is beautiful, probably one of
the most unspoiled parts of England."
Susan's third novel is based in Ingleton
and the Skipton area and is still a
work in progress.
12:07pm Tuesday 13th May 2008
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