As a Child

During the onset of my symptoms, I was troubled. The physical symptoms, mostly weak legs, were not bad but mentally I was torturing myself with worry. One afternoon, I was watching Ryan’s baseball game when a young girl and her mother sat in the bleachers in front of me. The girl, maybe 10 or 11, was handicapped and could not even walk without help. Her condition was clearly a lot worse than mine, and she was just a kid. I had 40 years of good leg use, and even compromised at 41, they still worked a lot better than hers. But was she as “troubled” as I was? I don’t think so. She seemed to be pretty focused on her pretzel. Why? How? What is the difference?

I think part of it is that kids have an ability to accept reality, giving no thought to what could have been or might have been. Consequently, they feel no self-pity. I was a kid once and although I didn’t have any dramatic disease or such, I was “afflicted” with several ailments. I had a “club” foot and wore special shoes and underwent some home therapy. Worse was the eczema. When it got bad, before bed my mother would apply the ointment to my arms and legs before wrapping my limbs in cellophane. The problem was this didn’t stop the itching and through the night the Saran wrap was no match for my ravenous fingernails that would be blood-stained by dawn. OK, that is a bit dramatic, but the point is I don’t remember ever thinking “Why me?” or even imagining life without these little afflictions. They made up me. It just “was.”

I also considered my sister-in-law who has been severely handicapped since an accident when she was five. Every once in a while she has an emotional “melt down” but for the most part, she is content and focused on present cares only. She is thinking about going swimming or her next meal, not about her limitations. Could I get to that place? Could I stop thinking about how it used to be?  Could I learn to instead focus on what I have and what I still can do, without worrying about the timing or the severity of my future limitations?

This is still a work-in-progress. Mentally and emotionally I am a lot better than I was, but I feel I have a long way to go yet. I felt as though I reached a “mental milestone” when I stopped looking at MS as an interruption to my life and instead accepted it as an unavoidable chapter in my life.