Heather Bellamy spoke with Emily Ackerman about ME, coping with life-changing illness, writing a book and being healed.

Emily: I fought that battle really carefully. I was desperate not to be sucked in to the 'poor soul' identity. In fact, when I was writing the book, I had a struggle with that because my editor was encouraging me to dig deep and be honest and I was so afraid of writing a 'poor old me' book, because I had spent so many years trying to keep my sense of self separate from the wheelchair and the disabled parking badge and the walking stick and all that stuff. I suppose in the end it comes down to relationship. I was sick for all those years, but I was also the mother of little children who loved me the way I was and I am a wife and I'm a daughter and I am God's daughter. In loving relationships, it's a different way of defining yourself. If you can make a toddler smile, maybe there is purpose and if you can walk out or be wheeled out into the beauties of creation and thank God for what he made, it's another way of defining yourself according to whose you are and where you belong.

Heather: And how did your family and friends cope with you being ill? Because something like that doesn't just affect the person themselves does it, it affects everybody around you.

Emily: It certainly does. I think it has been very challenging. I think that because I was so ill, sometimes they didn't feel like telling me how difficult it was for them. Suffering is not a competition and I am actually happy to hear about other people's difficulties, but I do understand that they were perhaps trying to shelter me in some ways. I think my husband, in particular, struggled with severe limits on his own life and his own life choices and I regret that, but I suppose that was God's path for his life. We just had to try to make it work together as a family.

The children grew up remarkably well adjusted and very practical. When my children left home, they were absolutely capable of cooking a meal and washing their clothes and getting them dry in time to put them on again, because they had been involved with the running of the household for many years. I think friendships...it's quite tricky. Having friendships with well people when you are ill...I often found myself entertaining, trying to be the clown, the funny, amusing, witty person, to try to keep my well friends, because I felt that they were so free; there were so many places they could choose to be that wasn't with me. I suppose I was struggling with the sense of being a diminished individual, like some kind of second class citizen. Now I don't think they viewed me that way, but that was something that I was dealing with.

Talking to other ill people with a wide range of different conditions, both mental and physical that is a theme that comes up again and again, which is why I chose to write about having healthy relationships even when your body doesn't work, or your mind is not thinking straight. I think that is a very difficult situation for ill people to be in that they are torn between burdening their well friends to the extent that well friends go away and withdraw, or living in un-reality with the people that they love so that they are shielding people from the realities of their illness and that's not an easy thing to hold in your hand when you are already feeling fragile because of your health,

Heather: So can you still have fun and enjoy your life when you're sick?

Emily: Well, yes, I mean goodness me, if there is no fun, we are doomed aren't we? I think if you get any group of people together who have substantial illness, the black humour starts up and the jokes just get blacker and blacker. I am delighted to have a wonderful cartoonist that worked with us on the book, David McNeill, and his cartoons just make me laugh and laugh. I think they are wonderful.

If you are very restricted, for example if you are housebound as I was for a long time, and somebody brings you a little posy of flowers out of their garden, you can enjoy it in a very particular way because you can end up with sensory deprivation if you're in a lot, or in bed a lot; such that the colours of individual blooms and the shapes and the textures and the fragrance, even just the feel of the leaves, is like a wonderful experience that can be milked for days. You can just really enjoy small things because you are excluded from so much of everyday life.

I also think that suffering can drive you away from God, or it can drive you towards God and in the times when it drove me towards God, I had wonderful moments of closeness with God. I have heard his voice in the still watches of the night and that is very precious. I am not sure that I would have worked so hard at my walk with God to be honest, if everything in my life had been hunky dory, so for me that has been the silver lining to a big chunk of suffering in my life that I do feel closer to God.

Heather: Are you still ill?

Emily: No, the Lord healed me in 2013. I am absolutely fully fit and well, which is amazing and that is my next book.

When I wrote the book, I wrote the book when I was still ill. It takes quite a while to hatch a book once it is finished; it doesn't just pop right out. In the latter stages of the editing I looked back as a well person, which was a really interesting experience. I looked back and just checked that everything was helpful and I made the decision not to put my own change in circumstances into the book, partly because I didn't want it to be as long as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and partly because I wanted to show respect to my readers, some of whom will not be healed in this life, they will be healed in heaven, so I just left it at the point where I had finished writing the first draft, which was as an ill person.

Heather: So you say it is going to be another book, but can you tell us briefly what happened; how did you get healed?

Emily: Well, how long have you got? God spoke to me very clearly about this that I was to seek out healing; that his time for healing had finally come. I had prayer for healing at my church and then I started waking at night with bad memories and bad feelings. I would wake up in nightmares; I would wake up in tears. I realised after a bit of this that God was putting his finger on unhealed areas in my life. In other words I had asked him to heal my body and he was starting with my grudges and my weaknesses. I had a choice to make at that point, was I going to choose to travel with God or was I going to turn my back on healing? So I chose to travel with God and over five months I was awake at least half my nights praying, crying, repenting, forgiving, forgiving myself, re-appraising and asking God to do for me what I couldn't do for myself. I had some more prayer for healing over the summer and then on the 1st September 2013 I woke up with no symptoms. I lay in bed and I shook because I had had symptoms every moment of the day and night for 23 and a half years.