Elijah Stacy, 22-year-old author of “A Small If”, founder of Destroy Duchenne, and Capricor Therapeutics Consultant gives his advice to patients and families dealing with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Transcription:

I wrote my book, “A Small If“, when I was 17 years old, and it’s a memoir that includes 13 life lessons that I learned throughout my life. I tell my whole story, I tell what Duchenne has done to me and my family and how it’s impacted me, but really, it’s a book about adversity and overcoming that adversity.

At the end of each of these chapters, the 13 life lessons, these lessons can apply to anybody. They’re universal, and they will help people live a more fulfilling, purposeful life, and also overcome the suffering that they’re going through. That’s what the book is about, and I think that it can just bring people a lot of encouragement in tough times.

The two things that I really want to focus on are one, to be positive and to remain positive. Being negative doesn’t help anybody. I talk about this in my book, “A Small If”, that if you’re negative, it just makes the situation worse. But if you’re positive, it makes things better no matter how negative the situation is. But the second thing is I want to show them that there’s a lot of things being done scientifically right now that brings a lot of optimism and hope for me at least, and other patients.

I try to focus on that because I do believe that things will get better as the years go on. I try to keep that in the back of my mind, and I try to remind patients and families that have newly diagnosed kids that, “Hey, things can get better.”

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