Category: In Which We Mock Our Illness

When you get MS, you prepare yourself for the typical MS symptoms. Not that I’m disappointed, but I’ve had MS for almost ten years now and there has been no disability. (And I’m all prepared!) Instead, I am plagued by the quirky little aberrations that occur when one loses chunks of ones brain to ones…

God is again punishing me for having sex with my husband. I have yet another bladder infection. As I am a virtuous patient, I trundled off to the doctor to get a culture and antibiotics. I have the sterilizing/wiping/urinating process down cold now: a result of the dozens of UTIs and the dozens of peeing…

I checked in the hospital for the IV steroid treatment a week ago. When a bed opened up, and I toted my stuff up to the room and was disconcerted to see that they had not cleared the corpse out of the other bed. The feet were stuck out at odd angles and a sheet…

At one point in the year after I was diagnosed as (ha) bi-polar, I began having my strange thoughts that all my friends hated me, and if people didn’t say goodbye with the right expression on their faces I would cry all the way home. If Marcia said hi to Libby before she said hi…

My insanity lay dormant for a few years. About the second week of June in 2003 my niece Arzanna-fay came to town. This is the girl child of Gary’s flaky Muslim-convert sister and the Pakistani mail-order doctor husband. We looked through photos of her fifth grade graduation. One photo was simply surreal: Three eleven-year old…

I often wonder if writers are depressed because they are writers, or if they are writers because they are depressed. It seems if you have been depressed, you have been to a strange planet and you come back needing to explain the chill in the atmosphere and the lack of color of the suns. Normal…

Before I found out I had MS, I still had MS. Ah, so young. So arrogant, so diseased and oblivious. No doubt one thing worse than having MS is having it and not knowing it. I was pin-balling between specialists for a few years before I was diagnosed. I saw an ophthalmologist for the optic…