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Saturday, December 23, 2017

It is What it Is


I think I’ve said this before. But I’ll say it again. During our lifetimes, we become accustomed to having certain illnesses or injuries and then getting better. Whether it is a viral illness or a knock on the head or a broken bone, we heal, and soon we are back to baseline good health, barely remembering the trial after some time.

That’s the way it works.

Only, with MS, and with many other progressive diseases, it’s not the way it works. We discover that no, the numbness in my hands and feet is not going to go away. The cognitive dysfunction in my brain, the loss of memory, is not going to improve. The neuropathic pain in my neck and shoulder is not going to disappear with medicine or rest of exercise or time. These things are permanent. This is our new normal.

This is so stubbornly foreign to our experience that we come to accept the reality only over time. Little by little, we become accustomed to disability, to pain. This is now me, from this point to the end. We are left to accept and adjust.

At first, we put up a fight. We say, if only I can find the right medicine, or surely I merely need to exercise more. Or we may say, if I have sufficient faith, I may be delivered from this trouble.

That last coping mechanism can be a particularly difficult stumbling stone, for ultimately we must conclude that 1) our faith was insufficient or 2) there is really no God. Of course, neither of these is the case. I remember that my mother was brought up in the Christian Science tradition. When my brother was suffering from cancer, she clung to the idea that diseases such as cancer are illusions – that God did not create disease, therefore disease does not exist, except in the imperfect mind. It is not difficult to imagine, therefore, that this caused all the more burden for her when her son died.

The fact is, at a certain point in life, we all end up with something that is going to overcome us rather than be overcome by us. It is not unusual. It is not wrong. And it is not an illusion. It is life.

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