As I’m sure anyone who’s still reading is aware, I’ve been painfully short of inspiration lately, so I asked several of my friends to give me some ideas for posts.  One thing that was mentioned by a few different people was multiple sclerosis, and since that’s been on the forefront of my mind a little lately–partly because of my recent MRI, but more because I’ve got a friend who’s recently been diagnosed herself and is having a hell of a time, to put it mildly–I figured I’d start out writing about that.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t shared all the details of my life with MS with most of you, so I’ll go ahead and begin at the beginning.  Fourteen years ago, on March 25, 1995, I woke up to go to my last day at work as a circulation clerk at the public library in the town where I lived.  After a couple of minutes, I noticed that my right hand was asleep.  I mean, really asleep, with super-hard pins and needles like I’d been lying on it the wrong way for a long, long time.  And it never woke up.  Not all that day, and not for over a month.

Some time later–after a couple of weeks, probably–my entire left side went numb.  It just felt tingly all over.  At that point I decided a visit to the doctor was in order, so I went first to my GP, who said it could be stress-related or connected to my history of migraines, but referred me to a neurologist, just to make sure.

The neurologist repeated the same “it’s all in your head” theories to me, but sent me for an MRI.  The MRI came back clean, so I didn’t get any definitive answers.  As unsatisfactory as I found them, the stress and migraine ideas were plausible (I was a month away from college graduation, had recently gotten a rejection letter from my number-one-choice grad school–University of Washington, if you’re curious–and my marriage was in the last and craziest stages of a year-long implosion process), so I accepted them for what they were worth and just hoped the numbness would go away.

It did go away after a couple of months, and I stopped thinking about it, until it came back maybe a year or so later.  From then on, I got little episodes maybe once or twice a year, but they were nothing too serious.  Occasionally I would have a little feeling of unsteadiness in my left leg, particularly on stairs or uneven surfaces, but otherwise my symptoms were entirely sensory.  A couple of years after the first incident, when Lydia was a baby, I started getting nerve twinges down my neck and spine when I bent my head forward.  That was worrisome because it felt so wrong (I know now that it’s called L’hermitte’s sign, a classic MS symptom), but I didn’t have the time or energy to deal with it, so I just tried to put it out of my mind.

Everything came to a head in April 1998.  One night while I was at work I started getting a weird cold-and-weak feeling in my left leg, and the next morning when I woke up, that leg just didn’t want to work.  I could hardly walk and I was all sorts of freaked out.  I called my doctor’s office and the receptionist told me they could get me in a week from Thursday.  Yeah, thanks but no, thanks.  I called my insurance provider and told them the story, and the woman I talked to said to get myself to an emergency room without delay.  That was more like it (seriously, what if I’d had a stroke or something?!  A week from Thursday, my ass.), so I hotfooted it–with my one good leg–over to the hospital.

Hours and hours and many tests and an MRI later, I had a diagnosis:  multiple sclerosis.  At that point, I didn’t really know much about MS, my only experience with it having been participating in the MS Read-a-thon when I was in elementary school.  On top of that, I had just finished a book in which the main character had ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease), and I remembered that that “S” also stood for “sclerosis,” so to say I was uneasy would be a gigantic understatement.  Furthermore, Lydia was just a year-and-a-half old and my then-husband was a crazy, useless piece of work, so the thought of the future–or potential lack thereof–scared the bejesus out of me.

After he had delivered the verdict and I’d sat with it for a couple of moments, I asked the neurologist, “I’m not going to die, am I?” and my voice caught on the tears in my throat as I continued, “I mean, I have a little kid …”

And this no-nonsense doctor, whom I fell in love with in that moment, looked me in the eye and said, straight-faced, “Well, you’re going to die, but not from this.”  From then on, I knew I was in good hands, and the worst of my fears were eased.

So, now you know how it all started (thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far!).  For some reason I didn’t realize what a long story this would turn out to be, so I guess I’ll give your eyes a rest and save the rest for tomorrow (or even tomorrow and the next day — fourteen years with a disease is a long time to cover in just a post or two).