Ann Romney never planned to write the memoir that arrived this fall as “In This Together: My Story.”

The former First Lady of Massachusetts and wife of 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney says she was perfectly happy, living life with her sprawling family, and advocating for research into the cause and treatment of multiple sclerosis, the disease with which she was diagnosed in 1998.

Then in January, while giving a speech about all she’d experienced and learned in her long fight with MS, the man who scheduled her speeches was in the audience that day.

“At the end of it he was actually crying,” Romney says from her home in La Jolla. “He said, ‘Oh my gosh, you have to write this down!’ I said, ‘It’s interesting, a lot of people have told me that but I don’t know where to start,’ and he said, ‘All taken care of.’”

Two weeks later Romney was in New York City meeting with publishers. The book arrived in September, and on Monday she’ll be in Santa Ana to sign and talk about the memoir that almost never was.

The story line that holds her tale together is the diagnosis of MS and how that unfolded in concert with all that she and her husband experienced in the 17 years since. The fact that she’s in good shape today given the prognosis she’d received at the outset remains a central point of her story.

“It’s kind of stunning,” Romney says. “I do look back and I do think about that all the time. Because I thought I was never going to have another good day.

“I’m kind of amazed and I continue to be amazed at the resilience and the strength that I’ve had despite the fact that I’ve been struck with MS. There are some things I feel that I’ve been blessed to do because of the associations I’ve made through MS and the struggles I’ve had.

“It’s my cruelest teacher but I’m also grateful,” Romney says.

From the initial prognosis with a doctor who gave her little hope of fending off any part of the progression of the disease Romney writes about finding ways to fight it, starting with a different doctor in Boston whose outlook was opposite that of the first.

After Mitt Romney took on the task of turning around preparations for the troubled Salt Lake City Winter Olympics of 2002, she rediscovered a positive affect on her illness in horseback riding in Utah, and later in alternative medical treatments such as reflexology.

“I was right there with them,” Romney says of the skeptics who are dubious of non-traditional treatments. “I thought this can’t possibly work. But it’s not until you get to a point where you’ve exhausted all of the resources and say, ‘OK, this can’t hurt me, it might help me, I’m going to try it.’

“I was desperate at that point,” she says. “And it wasn’t that immediate. I was thinking, ‘Is it really doing anything?’ And I found out over time that it actually did.

“It’s another tool in your tool box,” Romney says. “It’s not the only tool, it’s one of them. And now I don’t need it as often or as frequently. It’s something I can turn back to if I feel a little rundown.”

The life of a political spouse is a grueling one, and for the Romneys, each of Mitt’s three campaigns undertaken after Ann was diagnosed came only after they’d considered the impact it might have on her health. Ultimately, the combination of Western medicine and alternative treatments and therapies gave them the confidence to proceed, she says, though at times it wasn’t easy.

“It was a real balancing act and sometimes the disease won and I would lose,” Romney says. “Those were the moments where it was a little frustrating. You do have to be careful and you do have to learn how to marshal your energy.

“The hard part is you always want to keep moving forward and it’s hard to put yourself on pause. You look at these kids, how they have so much energy, and go, ‘Oh don’t I wish!’ But I’m going to be as smart as I can and be as effective as I can.”

In 2012, when Mitt Romney’s campaign took him all the way to the finish line before coming up short, he and Ann Romney often criss-crossed the country, checking in by phone, email and texts from different cities and time zones.

“Mitt would always come to my staff and say, ‘Now you be careful with her, don’t you overwork her,’” Romney says. “And the same day I’d be calling his staff and saying, ‘What are you doing, you’re killing him!’

“Between the two of us we understood that you pay a price.”

A year ago, she and Mitt Romney launched the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, with Dr. Howard Weiner, an MS expert who helped her in the early days of her diagnosis, and Dr. Dennis Selkoe, an Alzheimer’s disease specialist, its co-directors.

Romney is the public face of the center, going out to talk about its work and research, and helping raise funds toward a goal of $50 million for research into MS, Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease (also known as ALS), Parkinson’s disease and brain tumors.

“It’s a real passion and purpose of my life right now and I love it,” Romney says. “It’s so exciting and rewarding to feel like you’re a part of something that is so effective. They are the top in their field for making discoveries, these two doctors, and to bring together a coalition of people throughout the world to try to unlock the mysteries of the brain is really exciting to me.”

(Does that mean the ongoing chatter in some Republican circles about drafting Romney for a third run instead of the current crop of GOP candidates is off the table for good? Romney diplomatically says, “I’m like a lot of people, hoping that we’ll find someone, someone will emerge, to guide us through this.”)

Early in the book she writes about how heartbroken she was the first Christmas after her MS diagnosis not to have the strength to do all the things that were part of her family’s holiday traditions. Two days before Thanksgiving, her house full of children and grandchildren, the holiday work was going just fine, she said.

“I’m pretty much close to normal,” Romney says. “I still don’t have the energy I had before, but I can pretty much live my life. I’m watching some of the kids running around outside right now, and it’s just wonderful.

“I would never have imagined the joy in my life today 17 years ago when I was first diagnosed. It’s just amazing to me.”

Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@ocregister.com