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Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Pain in MS

I was reading a post this morning from Healthline about pain associated with MS. Although some 50 percent of MS sufferers experience pain somewhere in the range from mild to severe and from occasional to unrelenting, it is not one of the symptoms most often addressed in the literature--which seems odd to me, as it has become the symptom which, in the last two years, I must address (deal with) on a day to day basis. A night to night basis, for that matter, too. Relatively speaking, the symptoms I dealt with prior to two years ago--numbness, gait disruption, fatigue, cognitive dysfunction--seem more like irritants than disabilities. The pain I am experiencing ranges from 5-10 and is relentlessly present. In MS, this arises from any number of causes--malfunctioning muscles, weakened joints, inappropriate neural signals, arthritic responses, and so on. It is also a sort of pain that is difficult to treat, as it is occurring not as the result of something that has gone wrong in a particular body part or function, but from something gone wrong with the inscrutable nervous system itself, arising from a neuropathic response rather than a focused source, such as one would have in a physical injury. 

Aside from being painful, the pain is both physically fatiguing and psychologically depressing. One becomes weary without rest, exhausted. 

And so far, I've not been able to find the funny side of this. Not that any of these banes are funny actually, but I've always found humor, nonetheless, to be an effective say of negotiating the various fires set by our rebellious bodies. You've got to either cry or laugh, right? But pain is a dull-witted, uninventive fellow, stubborn and tedious and humorless. Like certain politicians nowadays. 

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