Whoah.
This relapse (spike in symptoms/exacerbation/whatevs) has drained me.
After falling face-first into some gravel, things have progressed steadily downhill.
Plates have been flying, I’ve become intimately acquainted with every wall in my house – and discovered every sneaky cobweb – and to top it all, vertigo descended yesterday and has been plaguing me ever since.
These last two weeks have been an exercise in containment – getting away with as little as possible to keep up the facade that I’m ‘doing OK’.
I’ve cancelled meeting up with friends. I have a birthday present to deliver that’s now three weeks overdue. I won’t be taking guitar lessons for the foreseeable (long story). Life, for the moment, consists of a need-to-do basis.
I had an initial meeting with my dissertation tutor and I agreed to hand in 7,500 words of a novel by mid-September. Lol. I’ve written just over 100. To be fair, they are excellent words and it’s just a shame there’s not more of them.
I’m becoming a little fed up of lying on my sofa after work with a Dulux paint chart, eyeing up the walls, just to pass the time of day. I’ve bought a tonne of gossip magazines, caught up on my Sky Planner and watched a wide range of subtitled films. My head aches.
I hate being forced to do the minimum; I am a doer, not a wait-er. I would rather drag myself to work than lie in bed. However, I might just be made to do that very thing, and fairly soon. The endocrinologists agreed today that after two years of yo-yo medicines, I will have an operation to remove my thyroid, as I developed Grave’s disease, a 1-in-3 chance of having Alemtuzumab treatment.
It was a chance worth taking, but the logistics will take a little working-out. Two weeks off work, unable to move my head and the possibility of a husky voice; the last one seems a fairly benign symptom though. Mariella Frostrup?
Anyway, as always, life has to go on and I am co-ordinating from The Sofa HQ. I watch the hours passing on my clock. I go to work, get home, collapse, go to sleep, get up and do it all again. Why? I don’t have a choice.
Today, I met a new endocrinologist. He was reading through my file as he ushered me into the non-soundproof clinic room.
He said to me, ‘Wow, for someone with MS, you do a lot, don’t you?’
‘Yes’, I answered.