Category: In Which We Mock Our Illness

In the past, I have made lists of things I want to accomplish over the weekend or vacation. I actually finish 50% of them. These last few months I haven’t even made lists. I’ve been in my room, reading, watching mindless things on YouTube, but mostly too tired to do anything but stare at the…

I love knowing how drugs work. For example, MS eats myelin, the outer layer of your nerves, so one of my MS meds was a syringe of decoy myelin. I mean, I have no idea how they made it, maybe it was hamster myelin, but whatever. I know the general plan of attack. This Modafinil/Provigil…

We cut my MS medication in half a few months ago because my immune system was plummeting. It held steady at 0.20 for … what … almost 20 years on the immunosuppressants? And then 0.18, 0.16 … and you can’t have that. So with that medication tweak, the house of cards started slipping and an…

About four hours ago I threw out my arm. I’ve thrown out my back plenty of times. You know that your back is out because without warning some muscle springs out of place, sudden pain, and now your legs don’t work. Well, I was typing away, and then suddenly I sprang a muscle, awful pain,…

At work there is a set of moderately heavy doors outside the parking garage. I routinely have to up my stride because someone is holding the door for me, and thus I have to hustle, because I am weak and lame, and such is the social contract: make the lame run. Recently a woman saw…

It’s been a month since this dust bunny cobweb floater showed up in my right eye. After my first visit to the ophthalmologist (a month ago) I was told to take it easy (for a month) and come back (in a month). In four days the flashing was gone, so I thought in another week…

Here I am, clocking my six-month visit with the neurologist Gary and I share. I’ve been communicating with the doctor’s office on my husband’s behalf to straighten out some dosing confusion brought on by Gary’s exponential math. I also spent a little time discussing Gary’s rash and joked that I might just switch him to…

This week I learned a number of things about posterior viterous detachment. I did get it checked out, like an ADULT, and it is the less serious of the two. It seems I’ll be looking at this little dust bunny in my right eye for the next month at least. Oh, and whhhhhhhyyy whhhhhyyyyy meeeee?…

I understand the neurologist needs to track all the side effects of my very effective MS drug. Hence, the bonus annual dermatologist visit and the twice-yearly ophthalmologist visit. I get it. Really, I do. I visited the ophthalmologist in the summer, where we got a baseline reading for my visual field with the most enjoyable…