Little Changes - Part Two

It's hard to beat a person who never gives up. 

~ Babe Ruth

The quote above resonated with me a couple of weeks ago so I wanted to include it.  While it may be true and I have no intentions of giving up, carrying the baseball analogy along, it is also hard to compete when you don’t know what you are up against.  At this point it is the unknowns, among other things, that have me a bit jammed up.

I think as a person dealing with a chronic potentially life changing illness… ha laughing at myself now.  My illness is clearly life changing and therein lies the problem.  On the outside, in my day to day efforts it appears as though nothing has changed in my life.  On the inside my body is conspiring against me.  A friend going through chemotherapy summed up what I am feeling in her blog.  It is like when you tap a tuning fork and then have it hum against your body, that is what it feels like in my body most of the time.  Like pins and needles without the pain.

So yes, I am still symptomatic.  Any kind of sustained motion triggers it such as a walk across the complex at work, swimming, riding my bike and especially running which drives the numbness into my back.  Every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday I eagerly take my meds (2 ½ weeks in and up to the second dosage level) praying that this will stop my disease in its tracks. I know it won’t make the symptoms go away as they need to recede on their own.  Most symptoms come for a month, three months or up to a year depending on the nerve effected which is consistent with the things I experienced the last 18 months.  I am just over two months into this round and I wake up with hope that this will be the day I wake up and things are quieter in my body again.

This week got off to a good start.  I have consistently had tingles in my feet for the last couple of months but is seemed like things were finally quieting down.  However things started to go downhill on Wed and now not only am I having a flare up that sends tingles to my waist with the slightest volume of movement, my hands have also started to go numb again in my pinkie and ring finger.  It is all very frustrating.  I normally deal with adversity by just gritting my teeth and grinding through the task, but MS is a funny beast because it won’t let me just grind through. It knocks me flat if I try and forces me to idle.  Something I am NOT good at!

Keep in mind I am not conceding the war only this battle.  I am just finding that I have to slow down a bit, and keep working on getting my head right so I can stay positive and win the war.  Like I said at the beginning this, MS is an illness where so much is not understood.  No one seems to know why the meds seem to work to hold the illness at bay.  No one seems to know what causes MS, and no one seems to be able to pin point how the illness will effect one person versus another so I collect data on myself and compare notes with my MS friends and I march forward, with occasional imposed idle times (which I strongly dislike!)  I continue to have hope that the meds work, the symptoms go into remission and I can live a full life.