MS Nutrition 101

The Son of Man came eating and drinking
--Matt 11:19

• Eat three or four balanced meals every day
• Limit your fast food intake to two meals per week
• Eliminate all sugary drinks (especially soda)
• Limit your alcohol beverages to one a day
• Drink at least 48 ounces of water each day
• Exercise at least 45 minutes five days a week
• Get seven to nine hours of sleep each night

Oh dear, I'm flunking MS nutrition 101.

Three or four balanced meals? Whatdaya mean balanced? You mean that the weight of the chips and salsa should not overbalance that of the ice cream?

Three or four meals? What, are you kidding me? I'm contending here with two dogs and two foreign exchange students! How much food do you think is left? Lately I've been skipping all but the bedtime snack.

Now where avoidance of fast food is concerned, I come through with flying colors. This is because I type ER reports for a living. Nuff said.

Eliminate all sugary drinks? What else is there to drink though? (Oh wait, I just remembered what my dad used to say: There's plenty of water in the Goddamn faucet!).

Now the alcohol intake is a toss up, for whereas I never drink nowadays (and for the last four years or so), I did come reasonably close to drowning in the stuff during earlier years. So what to make of this? I figure the way things add up, I've already had my lifetime quota, along with a couple other people's too.

Drink at least 48 ounces of water a day. (Regarding this, I think my dad would have said Turn off the Goddamn water before you run it all empty!).

Exercise?

Now sleep is good, and, again, I have that one nailed. Unless it is meant that one is not supposed to sleep more than 9 hours.

Irony

Life is full of ironies. Little ironies and big ironies. Ironies of varying size and character; gentle ironies, harsh ironies, humorous ironies, heartbreaking ironies.

I realize this may sound like an attempt to describe various dog breeds. You have your Terrier, your Sheepdog, your Shar-pei, and your Ironie.

But bear with me a moment.

The other day I was invited to write for an online community network devoted to good health and healthy living. It seems that the director, a doctor, had seen my blog on MS and etcetera, and liked it.

Now here is where the irony comes in. The fact is that even though I have the credentials for being genuinely ill, thanks to MS, I am, as far as healthy living goes, rather more of an advertisement for what not to do.

The truth is that even as I write, I am as likely as not to have a cigarette tucked between my lips, obscured from the world by a wispy halo of tar and nicotine, and all those other strange additives we've heard about (and maybe some we have not).

Chances are that I have just finished a wholesome breakfast of frosted strawberry Pop Tarts and coffee, and will later, for lunch, enjoy a large bowl of Butter Finger ice cream. With chocolate syrup.

But it was not always so. Time was, back when I was healthy (ironically), that I ate mostly healthy foods. I did not even like ice cream. Never did my shadow darken the door of McDonald's or Burger King. I liked rice, and potatoes, and pork chops, and broccoli. For a snack I would eat tortilla chips rather than caramel corn.

This present diet of mine, as far as I am concerned, is a direct result of multiple sclerosis. How else could it be that I have suddenly, in the last 2 years, no taste for nutritious foods? The idea of a normal meal may occasionally sound good, and certainly I know it is proper; yet when I sit down to the table, I find that I have no appetite at all.

This is something the dogs are happy about, for they are at least one step above the garbage disposal as far as the leftover contents on my plates go. Someone always benefits from another man's trouble. It's a cosmic law.

I consider my having ended up with multiple sclerosis to be an irony in itself. It is an irony in the same way as when a concert pianist, for instance, loses nine of his fingers, or when a race car driver loses an arm, or when a seeing eye dog loses his sight.

I have always wanted to write. I have always wanted to put down my feelings and thoughts in a cogent, artful way, with competence, with a consistent sort of grasp--and now here I am with a cognitive disorder, struggling to maintain my grip on the basic mechanics of language. Here I am looking up words like want and boat and jump in the thesaurus!

This is one of the funny sorts of ironies. Funny like a Chinese Crested dog--you know, the kind without hair, except for a shock on the head and tail--the kind that always wins the ugly dog competitions?

So maybe I can't talk much about good health. But I sure as hell know about irony, and irony itself is surely one of the first children of multiple sclerosis.