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Reservations Accepted Live Entertainment Friday d Saturday Nights 248-360-9671 Richard Cohen refuses to let his chronic and progressive illness make him a victim. DIANA LIEBERMAN • 115-Point Quality Check • 6 Year/75,000 Mile Power Train Limited Warranty Appetizers • Insalata • Zuppa Specialty & Traditional Pastas Chicken • Veal • Beef • Fish Deal With It er erson DELIVERY AVAILABLE Kosebudi s Ris-torante R . :Chard Coit., ,n 13.99 What Quality Checked Certified Pre-Owned Means to You! . sidt SALAD TRAY • Expires 12-31-04 • One Per Person • Not Good Holidays • 10 Person Minimum s, Lifting a Life Above illnessi per person WITH THIS COUPON WE CUT OUR - -: . ... CARRY-OUT LOX STAR * STAR 41 BY HAND! *STAR * STAR ST Ar St._ *STAR. *STAR Jewish Book Fair $6.95 1 OFF ' '14 ''''* SI : CO LE SLAW An COMPARE OUR LOW PRICES WITH ANY DELICATESSEN IN TOWN! MEAT TRAY • 7110 Cooley Lake Road.; W hen broadcast journalist Richard Cohen went on his first serious date with fellow CBS reporter Meredith Vieira in 1983, he decided the time had come to tell her his bad eyesight was more than just gar- den-variety astigmatism. Cohen had been diagnosed with mul- tiple sclerosis 10 years earlier, when he was just 25 years old. Since then, he'd earned a master's degree from Columbia School of Journalism, worked as a pro- ducer on Public Broadcasting's The MacNeil/Lehrer Report and on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, gone to Poland to cover the birth of the Solidarity movement and reported from the scene of armed conflicts in Beirut and El Salvador. The debilitating neurological disease had chipped away at his eyesight until he was close to legally blind. He had suf- fered intermittent attacks on his balance, strength, physical and mental equilibri- um. Yet he had persevered, and most of his colleagues had no idea of his illness. "Do you know what MS means," he remembers asking Vieira as the couple sat in the restaurant deciding whether or not to have dessert. "Yes. It's a magazine, Rich," she answered. - "Such scenes had been played out before," Cohen writes in his no-holds- barred memoir Blindsided• Lif-ting A Life Above Illness (Harper/Collins; $23.95).• "One woman might as well have been told her pants were on fire," he contin- ues. "She stopped dead in her amorous tracks, scanning the room for a fire exit." Not Vieira. "Meredith did not flinch or show any discomfort," he writes. "She looked me in the eye and asked questions for which, of course, there were no answers. There were pauses and stares into the distance." "I don't care,' she finally said." From Denial To Coping Cohen, Book Fair's closing night speak- er, will be at the West Bloomfield Jewish Community Center Sunday evening, Nov. 14, speaking about his career, his 18-year marriage to Vieira and, above all, his 30-plus years of doing battle with multiple sclerosis. "I'm fine. Really," Cohen said in a recent interview with the Jewish News. "This disease just becomes a part of who you are. You become used to the decrease in mobility, to being careful how much you take on yourself and what you do. A chronic, debilitating neurological disease, MS creates inflammation of the nerve cells and destroys the nerve cells' protective layer, known as myelin. The disease, which is incurable, affects people with differing severity and in different ways. People with MS can have difficul- ty walking, numbness, pain and loss of vision. Some of these symptoms are transitory and others persist. Today, Cohen's disease is a matter of public record. Even before the publica- tion of Blindsided last April, he had writ- ten numerous articles for MS journals, the New York Times and other publica- tions. Vieira, co-host of ABC television's The View and host of the daytime ver- sion of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, speaks frequently about the illness and its effects on her family. The couple actively support the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, with Richard produc- ing a monthly webcast that features MS specialists and researchers and Meredith serving on the board of the New York City chapter. However, owning up to his illness and its limitations took Cohen more than 20 years. And he's not sorry. "I seem to have viscerally and quite accidentally stumbled upon a coping mechanism of some value," he writes. The mechanism: denial. For years, Cohen continued taking grueling assign- ments. He hiked in the summer heat and continued taking subways. He told very few people of his illness. "For me, denial has been the linchpin of the determination to cope and to hope," he writes. "Denial allows any individual with a problem to invent his or her personal reality and to move for- ward with life in the belief that he or she is in control and can do what needs to