Week four~ Living with MS

I am heading into my fourth week of this “flare” of MS. Every day has had a new set of challenges that I have had to navigate around and deal with. Every day I remind myself it could be worse, I can do this but sometimes it’s hard. The hardest part of all of this is how many people look at me and just say “well you don’t look sick”. That is the funny thing about MS not everyone who has it has symptoms you can see all the time. You can’t see that I have limited sight in my left eye or that my hearing comes and goes in my right ear. You don’t see that I have difficulty swallowing but you may have noticed I have lost weight. You don’t see pain or the muscle spasms. You don’t see the depression or the insomnia. Add that to what you can see the tremors that have grown worse over this past week. The slurred speech and loss of muscle control on the left side of my face. Those things I don’t let you see because if you see it then it makes all this real. I smile so you don’t see that I just want to cry and ask why me? I don’t look sick because I can’t look sick to get through this. From the moment the doctor told me I had MS I knew no matter what happened no matter how bad I felt I would keep my head up because I know it could be worse and I am luckier than a lot of people with this disease. I may not be able to control what is happening to my body but I can control how I react to it. When my arms fail to hold me up in yoga last night, I did a run/walk on the treadmill. When I couldn’t hold my fork to eat eggs this morning, I made a sandwich. When I couldn’t shave my legs because of tremors I wore pants. I have quickly learned there is a solution for most problems I may encounter and I am becoming well aware there may be things I will need help overcoming. Like the loneliness. It is hard to go through something that many people in your life don’t understand and some haven’t taken the time to try to because I don’t look sick. It’s up to me to help them with that. No matter how bad things get I will remind myself, I have MS it doesn’t have me. I will get through the bad times and embrace the good with every ounce of being. That is how I choose to do this.