Visiting Dimensions

I am glad to say that I am a little better than yesterday, not great but better. I did give in a little early last night and disappeared under the duvet, were I drifted quite quickly into sleep, which surprised me as I hadn’t managed to even have my normal quantity of Gin, the proof I felt really bad, I didn’t even finish one. I am still not really with it and concentration is at a premium but I at least don’t feel like I am floating in a different dimension for the rest of the world, just on the edges looking both ways.

When everything closes off like that those are the times when I can actually sit here and full see that I am not well. Believe it or not it is easy to forget at times how ill I really am. Normal is something that changes for all of us throughout our lives but we desperately want to see it and believe it to be a universal state. Look at every decade of your life and normal has been something different for each of them. It would be great to have the normal of childhood for ever but life doesn’t work that way. My normal is ill, so how to judge myself other than that level of ill is hard. It is when I am like this that I fear I am looking at my future but I have nothing to say that is what will happen, but it is that fear that is the problem when you are living with a chronic illness.

None of us want to see our future as all of us will age and there is a high chance the last years of our lives will not be spent in good health or high activity levels. For many the vision of a old person who can’t hold a conversation as they have no way of thinking long enough to take part, sat there with life going on around them, just waiting for death, is scarey but normal. In a way that vision is acceptable, but I am only 51 not 81, and that could happen to me tomorrow, a lesion growing in the wrong place and I could wake one day to find I have left this dimension for ever. MS plays games that way, it takes things away and gives them back changed, or it can take things away and never give them back. Worse still there is no knowing which area or when that lesion will grow and how long it will take to destroy the nerve for ever.

Things being bad like this are the signs that my MS is at work, destroying something or other and it is working at a higher rate than ‘normal’. If you get a cold you get better, that isn’t the case for me. My illness is heightened and this could be my ‘new normal’ or just a visit to the future, either way it means I have to start to think about dealing with it, part of me says wait and see, but wait for what and for how long? I have learned to accept and adjust and I have always found my way through and I see no reason even if things stay as they are, that I won’t be able to do the same but my ability to do anything is going to be changed dramatically, even my ability to keep all my twitter going as well, I have been badly lost in what I have being doing, with out my spreadsheets to keep checking things off as done, nothing actually would be. I really could just sit here and do nothing. Nothing at all. I can’t see today turning out any different from yesterday, but what else can I do about it right now?

Finding Understanding

I didn’t realise yesterday a I wrote just what I was stirring up. The way I write really is a flow system, I start with a few selected sentences and I just run onward until there are no more for that day. It is I suppose a little haphazard but it works for me and I find that it forces the truth as I haven’t sat and worked out what to say, so only the truth can come out with ease. Just sometime though I start my mind working on what I can only explain as an area that I subconsciously had locked away, those things that we know but without a conscientious decision don’t want to think about. That is the danger I suppose of what I am doing, I am opening up my world and my very self in every way to everyone, including myself. I allowed my writing to open a door and my attempts to shut it, haven’t actually worked.

I have been thinking more about what is happening to me and how those slow steps down can be managed as much as possible to keep my life steady. I realise having thought about it, that I was naive to think that just as I have had a series of major events that change everything, that all of what MS will do to me, will be just like that. When I look at just the last year there has been a steady downwards slope that I have been traveling along with considerable ease. But that is because I have been lucky. I have the three parts of my that I see as the most precious intact enough to live my life within the boundaries of my happiness. I still have enough of my memory and mind power to think and write and understand. OK even that has changed due to my concentration problems but ‘I’ am still here. I still have enough eyesight to enjoy my world and enough to use of my hands to be able to type and operate my PC. The third is my hands without them well the PC thing would go. I see those three areas as essential to living a fulfilling life for me, I have lost so much else that these are the minimum requirement to maintain my happiness.

What has changed in the last year in brief are things like my mobility, my digestion and bowels, the pain levels in my legs and pelvis, my concentration and my trigger touch emotions, the stuttering and word lose. All of these are clearly in the progressive changes list, they have actually slowly continued to get worse, they are the drip drip things and the things that I had some how locked into the section I call normal. That is what I have been doing, hiding them in a tag that they don’t belong in because that way I didn’t have to think about it. If I just take one say my emotions, a year ago I only ever found myself bursting into tears when someone else said or did something trivial and instead of being angry or annoyed or even happy I would start crying, now, well now I can do it to myself, I can be writing or watching TV and totally inappropriately I will start to cry. It is always crying never laughter just tears, mind you laughing out loud when there is nothing funny might be more embarrassing than a few tears.

I think I have been hiding the truth as I just don’t want to see it for what it is. I was about to say, ‘I don’t understand why’, when I had a brick strike me between my eyes. It is so blindly simple, a major change is a challenge, I can apply myself to it and look for solutions because I can quantify it, I know exactly what I am up against, but how do you fight or quantify something that take weeks of slow change without being able to see it as that, the difference from yesterday to today is so tiny that it may be no change at all. I can’t look ahead of it, as I don’t know exactly where it is going, or what and how it will change. I can’t find solutions, as what exactly am trying to fix, how do you follow something that is untrackable.

Conclusion, progression is a bitch! It has also answered something else for me, I have a long term project that I have been planning for ages but I keep finding reasons why not to start yet, I now see why. I’m scared that the progression may beat me before I get to the end, as I just don’t know how much time I have before that concentration, or my hands or any other part of my stops me for ever. I am comfortable with blogging as it is daily, it starts and ends each day, but my dreamed of book hasn’t happened, as I don’t know if I will ever be able to finish it and I hate starting something and not finishing.