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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 After a couple of minutes, I noticed that my right hand was asleep.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And it never woke up.\u00a0 Not all that day, and not for over a month.<\/p>\n
Some time later–after a couple of weeks, probably–my entire left side went numb.\u00a0 It just felt tingly all over.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The neurologist repeated the same “it’s all in your head” theories to me, but sent me for an MRI.\u00a0 The MRI came back clean, so I didn’t get any definitive answers.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 From then on, I got little episodes maybe once or twice a year, but they were nothing too serious.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That was worrisome because it felt so wrong<\/em> (I know now that it’s called L’hermitte’s sign<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n Everything came to a head in April 1998.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I could hardly walk and I was all sorts of freaked out.\u00a0 I called my doctor’s office and the receptionist told me they could get me in a week from Thursday.\u00a0 Yeah, thanks but no, thanks.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That was more like it (seriously, what if I’d had a stroke or something?!\u00a0 A week from Thursday, my ass.), so I hotfooted it–with my one good leg–over to the hospital.<\/p>\n Hours and hours and many tests and an MRI later, I had a diagnosis:\u00a0 multiple sclerosis.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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 …”<\/p>\n 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.”\u00a0 From then on, I knew I was in good hands, and the worst of my fears were eased.<\/p>\n So, now you know how it all started (thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far!).\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 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… Read More MS — the early years.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}