MS Sufferer Relieves Pain by Giving

Laughter is supposed to be the best medicine, but Cami Walker is discovering that giving to others also has benefits.

Back in 2006, Walker was in her early 30s, living in San Francisco with her fiance and immersed in a job she found challenging but enjoyable. In fact, aside from the occasional tingling and numbness in her limbs, and fatigue that several doctors said was just stress, she loved her life.

However, a mere month after her wedding, these symptoms became unbearable. She lost the use of her hands, then her vision in one eye. After test after test after test, Walker was told she had multiple sclerosis, an incurable neurological condition that can leave sufferers completely immobilized.

As you might expect, the diagnosis and subsequent treatment affected Walker deeply. Two years later, she was depressed, sleepless for days on end, in constant pain and falling back into an addiction to prescription drugs that she had been fighting for years.

But one day when she was trying to deal with all the drugs she was taking, she got a gift in the form of tough love.

"I'd been in the hospital trying to change my drug regimen and thought I'd call my old friend Mbali, a South African medicine woman," she told AOL News.

Walker was looking for sympathy. Instead, she got a wake-up call.

"Mbali told me to stop having a pity party," she said. "She told me just thinking about my illness was feeding the disease."

Instead, Mbali suggested Walker stop focusing on herself and give away 29 gifts in 29 days.

"I thought, 'That's insane! I can barely get out of the house,'" Walker admitted. "But Mbali told me the gifts didn't have to be expensive. They could be a phone call to someone in need, or I could do extra stuff around the house for my husband."

Walker was skeptical, but wrote down the idea in her journal. A few weeks later, when she was having a bad flare-up, she opened the journal and reread Mbali's advice. This time it stuck.

"I called a friend with MS, and I tried to make it about her," she said.

That baby step of giving gave Walker a slight sense of well-being. From there, she worked on giving other gifts to people, such as helping other MS victims develop business plans or giving extra big tips to street performers.

"The key is, you have to be conscious of the giving, and you have to be mindful of what you receive," she said.

Eventually, she started reaping the rewards.

"By day 14, I was walking unassisted, and by the 29th day, I was able to go on a one-mile hike," she said. "That was my reward."

That was two years ago, but Walker still gives on 29-day cycles.

"Just today, I took my dog for a walk, and we did an extra lap or two," she said, laughing.

Walker's biggest gift is 29gifts.org, a website that explains how to give, shares stories about the positive effects of giving and raises money for worthy causes and people in need.

Since Walker began the website, more than 12,000 people have signed up for the 29-Day Giving Challenge online. Together, they have raised money to feed children in Africa, helped people pay for expensive but necessary surgeries and funded humanitarian missions throughout the world. What was once a personal journey has now become a worldwide movement that has affected thousands.

In the process, Walker got a gift of her own.

"About four months into it, we already had 1,500 members," she said. "An editor cold-called me and asked if I wanted to do a book. I told her I had thought about it but wasn't sure it was time."

Coincidentally, a few months later a friend gave her a ticket to a literary conference in San Francisco. She attended and met a literary agent who quickly arranged a book deal.

That book, "29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life," was published in 2009. It became a New York Times best-seller and earned her the Books for a Better Life MS Awareness Award.

Walker is now working on a second book and a screenplay that, in her dreams, would star Reese Witherspoon as her and Oprah Winfrey as Mbali.

But Walker is quick to point out that while the 29-day giving plan has improved her overall health and reduced the severity of flare-ups, she knows there is no cure for the disease.

"There have been lots of scientific studies about the effects of giving," she said. "It definitely made things better. I still have pain on a daily basis, but I can cope better."

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