Category Archives: Emotions

Aug 14 2018
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Emotions

Grand Theft Auto (Immune)

Sometimes, life with MS feels just like that pesky game – the bane of my life when The Teenager played it for hours on end – sitting at the wheel of a very fast car, out of control, driving around with no regard for anyone else.

MS is such an all-consuming illness, affecting every area of our lives.

Six years after being diagnosed, I still feel as if I am shaking the branches of a tree, seeing what falls out. What have I forgotten to deal with?

Serious illnesses are often portrayed as ‘monsters’, ‘the demon’,  an ‘enemy’, something external, something to be conquered. If you’re ‘lucky’, you may be in the clear after five years.

But what happens when the illness is within us? And will last a lifetime? Our very own immune system misreading their specific directions, wearing down, and ultimately attacking us?

Welcome to the wonderful world with MS, where not only do you lose friends, perhaps your job, or your partner, but also your own body has decided to attack you?

It’s a lot to deal with, and it’s personal.

So, perhaps you can deal with being sacked for having MS, however unfair it is. You can mourn the loss of a partner who couldn’t face an unpredictable future. You can talk sensitively with your son, explaining everything in gentle terms.

I won’t die, like your grandfather. I had great treatment. I’m trucking on (my alternative to the hideous ‘fighting’) with MS. I’m still working, I’m still here. I’m even still studying. It’s all fine.

Yet that kernal of auto-immune is always present. How best to prevent or delay this? Massive doses of Vitamin D? Munch on almonds every day? Yoghurt?

A restrictive diet, full of courgettes and not much else? Pasting a smile on every single day, and blessing it for allowing me another day where I can carry on with life, however limited?

Or. The alternative. Questioning everything and accepting nothing. Pushing myself to the absolute limit, to prove a point.

When this illness is within us, where do we go to escape?

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Jul 22 2018
4 Comments
Emotions

The Unwritten Script

There are certain expectations placed upon you when you suddenly become ‘disabled’.

In my case, I was duly sacked from my job ( I was a ‘liability’), dumped by my partner (the future was too uncertain; I mean, really?) and cast into an almost unrecognisable and vicious world of battles and tribunals.

Simply because I woke up one day with a ‘health problem’.

It’s no wonder the media labels us ‘warriors’, ‘battlers’ and ‘inspirational’. We ‘fight’ (often courageously) and we ‘campaign’ (for the same rights as everyone else).

Mostly, it’s not because we want to, but because we have to.

Tick the disability box on a job application and you’re in a different world (tokenism or the bin). Finally receive a Blue Badge and you fight the public if you ‘look ok’. Tentatively start dating and you face the ‘when do I tell them’ dilemma.

So what happens when you tear up that script? If you don’t accept the DWP can understand the difficulties you face, you’ll face a tribunal. If you don’t accept the nasty stares and comments when you use a Blue Badge, you face confrontations which could spiral (it’s happened).

And not only that, you’re pushed into proving yourself, over and over again. And then told, ‘well, you can do it, so what’s your problem?’

Should you prove you can or you can’t?

I realised this today when I was in work. I was nearly fainting from Uhthoff’s – MS heat intolerance- and I pushed myself to the point of near-collapse, merely to prove a point. I paid for it, ten-fold. Five minutes of pushing led to an hour of recovery. Is it worth it?

Tradition would dictate that, as a disabled person, I should accept the gracious help of our depleted welfare state, stay at home, keep quiet and get on with disappearing. And that’s where the trouble starts.

In our hundreds of thousands, we are refusing to accept the new PIP or ESA guidelines. We are standing up to everyday discrimination – taxis refusing to take us on short journeys, trains refusing to accommodate wheelchairs, and we often make the news (courageous, battling this and that illness, the usual script).

Remember the last General Election? Those endless newspaper double-spreads about how this or that Government could affect your voting choice? Was there a disabled person in amongst them? Probably not.

In fact, I was so angered at this, I contacted the BBC and made a short film asking why not one politician addressed how 11 million disabled people in the UK could be affected. Of course, nothing changed.

And still it continues, bar a few extreme (but sadly common) media-highlighted examples. Especially if the person is famous or has a lively social-media profile.

So where do we go from here? How can we persuade the Government, and the public, that we have a voice? That we can do remarkable things, just like everyone else? That we’re not ‘special’, ‘inspiring’ or any other insipid, patronising label that can be stuck on us as a gift from above?

I’d love to hear what you think …

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Jun 28 2018
6 Comments
Emotions

Appealing for sanity?

Well.

I have now, at the last minute, submitted my appeal to Her Majesty’s Courts.

Stuff just got serious.

I got turned down at the Mandatory Reconsideration stage, due in large part to some person coming to my house and writing fiction/ticking off a list about me.

There were lies and then there were the downright lies. It’s one thing to assess my MS in less than 40 minutes (which is bizarre and actually completely impossible), it was another thing to doubt my witness.

So we are both wrong. And probably lying. As it happens, I am going through a particularly difficult MS flare up – not new, happens every couple of months or so (as reported).

Redial back, and after my Mandatory Reconsideration notice, I was willing (if I had the energy) to throw in the towel.

They didn’t believe me.

I had Alemtuzumab treatment, the strongest licensed treatment, at present, for MS. Three times, when we usually have two and that’s enough.

Each course costs at least £30,000.

I have a rapidly-evolving type of MS, hence the aggressive and brutal treatment. Basically, it removes your immune system. Easy?

Not really. Not at all.

And now, in amongst a further MRI to assess my MS, I am awaiting my day in court. And there was me thinking MS was brutal.

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May 23 2018
6 Comments
Emotions

The Best Worst Day of My Life

Six years ago on Friday 25th May, it’ll be my six year MS-versary.

Six!

It feels like yesterday. I vividly remember parking up a whole hour early, my car facing the huge hospital before me.

For some bizarre reason, I tried out a new lip-gloss as I waited, a freebie from a magazine I was probably too old for, my nerves shredded.

After an hour, I locked the car and made my way to the clinic where I flicked through a battered Argos catalogue. I was called through and in less than ten minutes I was diagnosed with a highly-active form of MS and offered two different treatments.

I left, dazed, spaced-out, stumbling, a sign of things to come. I stuffed the leaflets into my bag, sat in the car and exhaled, catching sight of that awful lip-gloss in the mirror. It truly was dreadful,  but at that point, I could’ve painted a clown face on and not worried about it.

No one wants to be diagnosed with MS, but after 10 months of endless relapses, I just needed an answer, and with that, access to vital treatment. In the interim, I was spinning around in a frightening world of anxiety and fear. My health was declining rapidly, I was confused and I was losing control of my life; partner left, sacked from work. Cat stuck by me.

In the car, I smiled. I would be treated. The medicine, no matter how brutal (and it was pretty harsh), would slow this all down. Give me some breathing space, allow me the energy to get The Teenager through High School, that he’d just started. The timing wasn’t great.

Six years on and three courses of Alemtuzumab treatment later – one more course than the usual two, thanks to a particularly active bunch of lesions – we’re still here and still doing well (or ‘calm‘, as The Teenager would say).

He’s wrapping up his first year at University and I’m doing … ok. Ish. It’s been an unimaginably steep learning curve, adapting to a life I’d imagined would be a couple of decades in the future. Slowing down, readjusting.

I sleep a lot and have the whole routine down to a tee – blanket, earplugs, zonk. I’m gone. I can quite literally say, I could sleep anywhere, anytime. And that’s before 8 hours at night.

I trip a lot. I fall over a lot. My hands are wonky and my feet don’t listen to me. And as for the nerve pain; that’s a whole different matter.

Six years on, I’m in a perpetual cycle of adapting, albeit on a downward path. Yet the more I go downwards, the more my mind struggles to stay afloat.

I push myself, then have a little nap.

I could count out my post-MS life in naps. But I would far rather count it out in successes. We’re still here, and we’re here for the long-term.

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May 15 2018
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Emotions

The Gap In The Narrative

There’s an insightful documentary on Netflix, ‘End Game’, about end-of-life care. It’s a beautifully moving film and I highly recommend it.

One of the doctors explained that ‘suffering’ is the gap we experience between how our lives were and how they are now, and this hit a real chord with me. It’s all about acceptance, right?

Although he was talking about the End Game, it was a powerful and invigorating point.

We are diagnosed, we grieve, we accept.

We gather ourselves together and get on with life, however short it may be.

It sums up what I’ve been tussling and struggling with these last six years.

Simple?

Perhaps not.

All of us who are diagnosed with an incurable and degenerative illness face loss, and it’s incremental. We may not be at death’s door, but the loss is there and potent. We may have to accept our jobs are under threat, our partners lose patience, our friends drift away.

Should we accept that this has happened and if we don’t, are we still suffering? Perhaps:

  • I could have pressed my ex-employer for more compensation, but I chose not to stoop to their level.
  • I should have been worried when the government and the media started spewing out anti-disabled/benefits propaganda?

Suffering to acceptance is a very, very difficult journey for anyone to make, far less someone with an illness such as MS.

So, say we get through all that, as I hope I have. My son is fine, my MS is governable. Right, next stop, Acceptance?

I think this is only true at a micro level, which I think an illness such as MS thrives upon, for the good. MS brings us up short. We do smell the roses. We are normally young so have the chance to change our lives.

It may not be absolute acceptance, but it’s half-way there?

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