Last night we watched an installment of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, the BBC series based on Elizabeth George’s detective novels. I’m a fan of the books, and I ordinarily enjoy the television program, but last night’s show, If Wishes Were Horses, annoyed me no end.

All was going along swimmingly until it was revealed that the murdered man had recently been diagnosed with–gasp–multiple sclerosis. I have learned to brace myself for some serious irritation whenever MS is introduced as a plot device, because the condition is almost invariably portrayed as something far different from what it actually is. Last night’s entertainment was no different, with the newly-diagnosed MS-sufferer being a man who must have been nearing his sixties. Though he had shown up to that point no serious symptoms of the illness, he immediately set about putting his affairs in order and re-writing his will because he “didn’t know how long he had left.” Please, spare me.

First and foremost, MS is not a fatal illness. People with MS have a life expectancy only six years shorter than average. Second, the vast, vast majority of people with MS are diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 40 (I was 25), and women are twice as likely to get it as men. While there is a nefarious type of MS called “chronic progressive,” in which onset of disability is rapid and, as the name indicates, progressive, it is not the most common type and an active, fit, “mature” gentleman approaching sixty is not the sort of person who has it. Assuming that he really was diagnosed with MS (unlikely), he would have to be showing some sort of disability–and worsening disability at that–to be considered to have chronic progressive MS. Imagining further, that he was a truly rare case and that he did have chronic progressive MS, there would be no reason for his doctors and him to think that his days were limited.

Not surprisingly, the general public has little idea about the details of MS–I didn’t myself until I was diagnosed almost seven years ago–and misrepresentations like the one we saw last night serve only to increase misunderstanding of the disease (N.B. I’m sure that’s true of a thousand and one medical conditions, but this is the one I’m familiar with). I used to listen to Dr. Laura on talk radio (yes, yes, I know, but this is not about that), and I will never forget her taking to task a young woman caller who said that she had MS and was planning to get pregnant. According to Dr. Laura, this woman was doing a very wrong thing. She asserted that doctors advised women with MS against having children for a variety of reasons, including risk to themselves and their pregnancies and their inability to care properly for a child. She advised the caller to do some “research” so that she would realize how reckless and foolhardy her plans were.

It was a few years ago that I heard that show, and I still hope on a regular basis that that women did indeed do some research, because no doctor with the slightest knowledge about MS would give a blanket advisement against pregnancy and motherhood for a woman with MS. Not only that, but every single source of information I have ever come across states clearly that pregnancy poses no special problems to a woman with MS. Of course, I expect that there are some women whose level of disability is such that it would be extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible, for them to care for a small child, but those women would be the exception rather than the rule.

I take this topic quite personally, obviously, but I guess I just wish that writers would quit grabbing MS out of thin air whenever they’re looking for a quick and deadly disease. Maybe if that happened people would stop reacting as though I’d just posted my own death warrant whenever I tell them that I have it myself.