Oh, right … pretty much everything was sucking hard, and I was rapidly approaching breaking point.

The interferon injections were supposed to reduce the number of flare-ups I was having to two per year, at most.  Ideally, I would have only one, or even none.  Clearly, it wasn’t working for me, and after a couple of years, my doctor and I were beginning to discuss the possibility of changing my treatment course.  One of the options he mentioned was immunosuppression therapy, like the kind given to organ transplant patients, but we decided against it because I hoped to have more children one day, and this treatment would almost certainly have an impact on my future fertility.  We also discussed methotrexate, a chemotherapy drug, but there were the same issues with extremely unpleasant side effects.

We decided, finally, that I would continue for the time being with the interferon and also add a high dose (200 milligrams) of prednisone once a month and see if that improved things at all.  As it happened, I never ended up doing the mega-doses of prednisone, though for the life of me I can’t remember why.  Even though I decided against the more drastic options, I can see now that the doctor must have thought I was in a fairly bad way even to bring the them to the table.  I don’t think I fully realized that at the time, which was probably a blessing, given how much stress I was already facing.

As I grew less and less able to perform my work, I started investigating my options and discovered that if I were to quit due to physical inability to work, I would be able to collect unemployment payments while looking for a job I could do.  Even the modest amount I would get on unemployment would be more than a twenty-fold increase on my take-home pay for the last month I worked, so I wasted no time getting that arranged.  Lydia and I also moved from our two-bedroom house to a studio apartment, and I had my old dog put to sleep and took my young dog to the humane society.  The thing with the dogs is hard for me to talk about, even though I know that I really had no other options available to me;  in my defense–even if I need defense only from my own guilt-ridden self–my old dog was sick and in a rapid decline, and I know for a fact that my young dog went to a good home.  Even so, I still don’t feel I acted honorably where they were concerned.

Anyway, what was done was done, so I moved on from it as best I could.  It was around the time that I stopped working that Olof–whom I had met online several months earlier–and I started seriously talking about Lydia and me moving in with him in Stockholm.  We eventually decided to aim for mid-January as a move date, which would give me about three months to get everything in order.

Once I stopped having to worry about work and was able to worry somewhat less about money, my stress levels started to even out.  Also good (for me, anyway!) was that my ex-husband was in jail and wouldn’tbe released until January, so I didn’t have to worry about him calling me or showing up at my house or otherwise harassing me.  And of course, the prospect of building a bright, shiny, brand-new life in Sweden did wonders for my state of mind.  All of these improvements led directly to an improvement in my MS symptoms, and by the time we left for Sweden I felt on pretty firm footing, both figuratively and literally.

Before the big move, I filled my interferon prescription one last time, which meant I had a three-month supply of injections and no real prospects to get any more (I came to Sweden without a residence permit, so I wasn’t entitled to national healthcare at first, and there’s no way we could have afforded the medication on our own — without insurance, it cost about $1000 per month, which is obviously not do-able for just about anyone).  After my stash ran out, I wasn’t on any MS treatment whatsoever, and you know what?  I didn’t get any worse.  I still had flare-ups here and there, but on the whole I had fewer than I’d had when I was on interferon therapy — proof positive, to me, that it really hadn’t been working for me and that stress was indeed the primary catalyst for most of my problems.

That’s not the end of the story, of course, and there’s still at least one more entry before I’ve got this tale told … so tune in tomorrow to find out how the past eight years have treated me.  You won’t be disappointed, I promise.