What's it like being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis? The easiest, and arguably, best way, to describe this "snowflake disease" is simply that it's suuuper weird.
Disorientingly weird, like being drunk all the time. It comes along with all embarrassing consequences of drunkenness, like stumbling or passing gas in public places, but without having touched an iota of alcohol.
You're fighting an opponent you're woefully outmatched against. Because MS is always changing the playing field. Changing your sensations, Changing your recollections. Changing you. Sometimes it's gradually and minimally, others it's suddenly and entirely. But the changes occur regardless.
You have this acute awareness of how different your actions and feelings are from the way things used to be. You feel strange, disconnected from your once familiar body, that's now a home to a host of odd symptoms.
It's hot all the time, scalding hot, Your body moves in unfamiliar ways called spasticity, but you just know you can't do things that used to feel seamless, like dribble a basketball or move to the beat of a song. Those nerves are long gone, lost to wherever it is nerves go once MS is done with them, along with your memory. Replaced instead by tremors, incontinence, and persistent non-stop dizziness.
I don't know how the remaining chapters of my story will end—I don't even know how to end this blog post—but nowhere in those pages will it say that I gave up the fight against multiple sclerosis.
Disorientingly weird, like being drunk all the time. It comes along with all embarrassing consequences of drunkenness, like stumbling or passing gas in public places, but without having touched an iota of alcohol.
You're fighting an opponent you're woefully outmatched against. Because MS is always changing the playing field. Changing your sensations, Changing your recollections. Changing you. Sometimes it's gradually and minimally, others it's suddenly and entirely. But the changes occur regardless.
You have this acute awareness of how different your actions and feelings are from the way things used to be. You feel strange, disconnected from your once familiar body, that's now a home to a host of odd symptoms.
It's hot all the time, scalding hot, Your body moves in unfamiliar ways called spasticity, but you just know you can't do things that used to feel seamless, like dribble a basketball or move to the beat of a song. Those nerves are long gone, lost to wherever it is nerves go once MS is done with them, along with your memory. Replaced instead by tremors, incontinence, and persistent non-stop dizziness.
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