Books
These two books were not planned. They began as a personal record written during rehabilitation in Southport, initially as a way to document what had happened and make sense of an experience that had abruptly changed everything. What started as an outlet for anger gradually became a place for reflection. Eventually, it became this.
Both books are drawn from lived experience of CIDP. Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy and the long, uneven recovery that followed months in intensive care, a bone marrow transplant, and a lung collapse that happened on the very night the hardest part was supposed to be over.
They are not medical accounts. They are records of what happened internally while everything external was being stripped back.
Through Fire and Silence
Illness, Identity, and the Discipline of Silence
This book does not begin with the illness itself.
It begins after the shock wore off in the long middle space where survival had stopped being the only question, but recovery had not yet found its shape.
Silence is at the centre of this work. It arrived first without choice forced by physical incapacity, by weeks of being fully conscious but unable to speak, watching decisions being made around him and about him while locked out of the conversation. Later, silence became something different. Deliberate. Strategic.
A way of protecting energy, managing access, and choosing what was worth engaging with.
This book examines what illness does beyond the body. How vulnerability becomes currency. How concern can shift into control. How proximity gets mistaken for permission. And how, slowly, it becomes necessary to decide not just how to survive but what to let near you while you are trying to.
It is about adjustment, discipline, and the quiet work of rebuilding without performance.
Finding Strength in Numbness
This book follows the arc from the beginning.
The first signs were easy to dismiss , a hesitation on a familiar step, fatigue that lingered longer than it should, a hand trembling while lifting a glass of water.
By the time medical intervention became unavoidable, the body had already changed fundamentally. Admission did not feel like a decision. It felt like concession.
What followed was months in intensive care, where time lost its shape, identity dissolved into data on a screen, and survival was something being maintained rather than actively achieved. After the ICU came something harder in its own way , the return of consciousness, of responsibility, of a world that had resumed its pace without waiting.
This book does not end with recovery completed. It ends with movement. With effort. With the honest acknowledgement that not returning to who you were before is not the same as failure.
Read Before You Buy
Selected passages from both books are available to read before committing to the full work. These excerpts give a clear sense of the voice, the pace, and the themes.
Through Fire and Silence Excerpt
|
Finding Strength in Numbness Excerpt
Ayoposi Ojelabi|AUTHOR 