Where to start?
Six months ago I got sick. It seemed like a really bad flu that wouldn't go away. I was laid out on the couch for days, until I finally managed to drag myself to a doctor. I hadn't been outside in so long that the cold February air compressed my lungs to the point that I could barely breathe. The doctor said I had bronchitis, and gave me some nasty pills for it.
The nasty pills did not agree with me. They made me depressed, anxious, and made everything taste like burnt vomit. I went back and told him I couldn't take them anymore. He gave me something else, and I got better eventually, but I figure it was just my own body healing itself instead of all the antibiotics.
Then, out of nowhere, my right foot started to hurt. A lot. It felt like it was on fire, like I had sprained it, like I had run a marathon the day before (I hadn't). It got worse. It crept all the way up to my waist. I went back to the doctor.
He told me it was X, and to go to physiotherapy. The physiotherapist said, "Doctors always say X. This isn't X." So I went to another doctor. And another. And another. I had blood taken, and x-rays taken. It was getting worse. Now it was in my left foot. Now it was creeping up my left leg. It felt like pins and needles. It felt like my feet were freezing cold. My sciatic nerve was doing something. And then other nerves that don't have such recognizable names, they were doing something, too. All the little wires that connect my extremities to my spine to my brain, they were all active at once. They were active all the time. All. The. Time.
The MRIs started. First the lower spine. Nothing. I'm taking these pain killers; they make me exhausted. They make me feel dizzy, they make me lose my balance, they make my hands shake. At first I take them intermittently because, on good days, the pain killers are worse than they pain. Soon, I can't go a day without them.
All the while we're ruling out things. It's not this kind of deficiency, this kind of syndrome, there's nothing wrong with your spine. Everything seems to point to multiple sclerosis. I'm terrified.
I know exactly one person with MS. He was my supervisor when I started my master's, almost ten years ago. At that time he was already approaching retirement age, but he was energetic, full of life, and weird (in a good way). He had received his diagnosis while I was his student. By the time I left the program, he was walking with a cane. A few years later I saw him at a conference, and he had a walker. A couple of months ago I saw him at another conference, and he was in a scooter. He had almost completely lost mobility in his legs. He looked exhausted, pained, sedated. If it took only a few years for someone to go from riding his unicycle to work (as I said, he is a great man, but still a weird one) to not being able to walk anymore, what would I be like by the age of 40? Would MS cripple me that quickly? Or kill me?
I was waiting on the results of the MRI of my brain. I did my research, and booked a follow-up with my doctor. Had he checked for demyelenization in the four areas of the brain as outlined in the Revised McDonald Criteria? Why hadn't I been injected with gadolinium before the MRI in order to make potential lesions show up more clearly? Is there any way to know whether this is actually going to kill me?
The results came back. It was nothing. My brain is normal. There are no tumors, there is no sign of MS, there is no sign of a lot of other things it could have been, the names of which I have forgotten because of the relief I was experiencing.
So now we're back to square one. There are a few more things it could be. I'm not out of the terrifyingly-debilitating-disease-forest yet. The pain is still here. I'm writing about it today because today is a bad-pain-day. Before this whole thing had started, I didn't know that these kinds of days existed. For those of you who have chronic pain, who have MS, who have something else that makes a day every-so-often just a complete wash, I empathize.
