Tag Archives: pandemic

Endings and Beginnings

The last 20 months have been the hardest and most painful in my life.

Losing first my brother then my mum within 18 months, and with a global pandemic rearing its ugly head in between has been challenging on every single level. At times it felt as if my entire world had brutally shifted on its axis.

Life changed beyond all recognition. I made the decision to come off all my MS symptom medication (I took advice from my wonderful neurologist, but decided to go cold turkey – I was in such an enormous amount of pain, what was a little more?)

Just as I was thinking about reconnecting with the world last March, it started to shut down. It seemed cruel and ironically similar to the first years of living with MS; an inaccessible world, yet this time everyone was going through the same emotions and fears, shut at home with no idea of when we could all be together again and live life as it was meant to be lived.

We all felt disconnected and yet in ways more connected than ever. My son moved back home for six months, continuing his university studies and starting work for the NHS. We bonded in a whole new way, living as two adults in a small cottage, keeping each other buoyed up as the pandemic played out. We adapted, shared our frustrations, found new ways to get through each day.

And that’s what life came down to in the end, putting one foot in front of the other, and if we made it to the end of the day having done nothing else than get through it, that was an accomplishment in itself. We grew and learned together and looking back on it, we have come through it stronger as our little team of two.

There is no easy way to deal with grief, but taking joy in small moments helps – snowdrops blossoming, an unexpected gift dropping through the letterbox, sitting outside with a coffee watching the clouds pass.

There are tendrils of new beginnings; picking up work and studies again, reconnecting with family and friends on a deeper level, the start of a new relationship.

Right now, I am still in the each day at a time stage, but as each day passes, it gets a little easier.

Tagged , ,

Hunkering Down In Lockdown

I was off work for a week during the dramatic escalation of Coronavirus here in the UK and had felt quite cocooned, my usual MS problems combined with a trapped nerve I was receiving treatment for having kept me at home.

Going back to work was unreal: it was the same building site, luckily secluded with only one other person working, but everything was different. I looked around, remembering the Good Old Days when my main concern was picking up milk on the way home. It was utterly impossible to take in, that the world had changed so much and in such an unexpected way. Driving back through an emptied capital city just reinforced this. Life would never be the same again.

I cried. I cried on site and I cried when I got home. Watching the news and seeing country after country across the world close down was utterly beyond comprehension.

Fast forward a couple more weeks and my son is now home from University, still studying online and now working as a housekeeper with the NHS. He makes his bed in the morning and cooks for himself but I am banished from our living room when he works out, huffing and puffing with my weights and kettle-bell that served just fine as a doorstop for many years.

There is much talk about the ‘new normals’ – something all of us with MS have had to adapt to over the years, regardless. It is heartening to see so much online and, wow, accessible. For once, the world is perhaps coming to us. So this is a very unreal situation for those of us who are quite at home with being, well, at home, because we have to.

For me, I have strategies in place. Concentrate on small pleasures, make a list, watch the clouds go by. Now we are all doing the same thing, it’s quite wonderful. The media is full of ideas, hints, tips, opinion columns, all aimed at Me. Us. Suddenly, museums are open, there are online lectures, I can travel the world, dip in and out of talks with the cream of authors. In a way, it’s amazing.

Yet, can this last? If you are on furlough, are worried about your job or have you always been at home, what happens next? Will these wondrous interventions such as tele-medecine continue? What we thought could take years, has taken place in a matter of weeks.

So, it looks good for us? Or does it? The benefits system has yet to catch up. A lot of us cannot access carers. There are no groups, no access to the work we once took pride in. Where do we figure in this seismic change?

We cannot be forgotten during this. I know there are a huge amount of fantastic interventions in place, but there are always people behind the figures and we cannot forget this. I can’t think of a time that is more pressing for an understanding of MS, bar my dad being diagnosed back in the 70’s.

MS charities may go under but we need them more than ever. Engage, if you can, take part in discussions with them and if you have the energy, fundraise. They need us as much as we need them.

Tagged , , ,