An Argument

I am having an argument with my body, and this morning my body has the upper hand (which is a polite way of saying that it's kicking my ass . . . which, of course, is it's own ass).

The reader may already be aware of my "bad box of Avonex" issue, the ensuing extremis of the flu-like symptoms I suffered from said bad box, and my growing feeling in the wake of all this that continuing to inject Avonex might be a downright stupid thing to do.

Two weeks without Avonex, and I have felt great. I haven't felt better in years. Two years and seven months, to be precise.

Until this morning.

This is the argument that my body makes, a rather pointed argument, an argument of stiff limbs and phantom pains. It is an argument forcefully made. Like a headlock. Like a fist in the face. My body does not pussy foot around. It goes straight for the solar plexus. Yes, my body has got me by the balls.

After slapping me around for awhile, all the way from the bedroom to the kitchen and back again, it pauses to state its point a bit more gently (i.e., I laid back down on the bed).

This, my friend, is why you are taking the Avonex. Remember? It could be worse, you know? Do you want me to make it worse?

Well, then again, maybe I just slept wrong, I say. It's just a matter of shaking the kinks out.

You think?

It could be.

Are you willing to take that chance? Could be, you say? What would you guess the percentage on that is? What are the odds on that horse, Dude? And what about that demyelination on your brain and spine. Just a once in a lifetime accident, you think?

Could be, yeah, I answer, unable to come up with a better response. After all, my legs are hurting, my hips are hurting, my neck is hurting, and I feel dizzy and disoriented.

Dude, you're pathetic, by body says.

Well, there's no need to get snippy.

Oh really! No need to get snippy? So here's what you're saying, right--you're saying that just because you're too much of a wimp to take a few flu-like symptoms, I'm left with running the risk of ending up crippled, rolling around in a wheelchair, depending on people to do every damn thing for me.

No, that's not what I'm saying.

Maybe it's not what you want to be saying, but it is what you're saying, it's exactly what you're saying.

But that's not what I want. All I want is for us to be in agreement on this thing.

SO SHUT THE HELL UP AND TAKE THE DAMN SHOT!

And so it goes.

Yesterday I received my two replacement doses of Avonex. Are they good ones? Are they bad ones? I don't know yet. I am supposed to take a shot this evening, yet I still just do not know. I guess I'll wobble around and think about it for awhile, stumble over to Starbucks for a coffee.

Did you hear something? A whisper just then . . .

**stumbling beats paralysis, Dude, seven days a week**

The MS Brain

A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Most people will say 10 cents. This answer tends to look obvious at first glance, nonetheless it is incorrect.

This example is given in a book about the brain that I am reading. It is given as an illustration of how the brain thinks, which is really not at all like a computer nor a calculator. Rather, it appears that the brain will often run on intuition rather than logic, the reason for this being that the route to conclusions is shorter, faster on the intuitive highway than on the bumpier road of logic.

Now, on the other hand the damaged brain (i.e. the MS brain) falls into the habit of taking long-cuts. This is because multiple and various routes are blocked by scar tissue. The process runs up against a wall. It reroutes. This takes just long enough to create physical or mental deficits--spasticity, confusion, indecision, cognitive hiccoughs, feet that buzz, shoulders that twitch, hands that tremble.

Maybe you get lost in a parking lot while your brain is busy at sending thoughts through dizzying alternative channels, picking up the necessary information to arrive at a proper construct of sight and memory, motor response and accurate identification. Maybe you actually become dizzy in the process as well, adding a further impediment to the solution of your quandary.

Let us say that yesterday morning you fell down the stairs in your house. This is something that most all people will do at one time or another (unless they have no stairs in their houses), but with MS it is something you can count on happening if indeed you also happen to have a molecular beaver dam halfway down the stream between the lift foot instruction and the put foot down instruction.

We begin, therefore, after enough falls, after enough endless journeys around the parking lot, to commit ourselves to a deliberate sort of thought process. This is not to say that we succeed at all times (or even at most times), but it is a matter of practice, a matter of adjustment. In MS there is no straight route, and there is no intuitive route--there are only the routes that propose to navigate the damage that was done by the storm--whoops log-jam there, washed out bridge to the south, we will have to go north and then cut back again, down by the old river road--you know, the one that hasn't been used in ages. And so forth.

More and more I try to practice an artificial sort of deliberation as often as possible. This in turn often results in a physical slowness that mirrors the mental, a necessary trade-off. I stand by the door counting my way through a checklist--keys, cell phone, wallet, cigarettes, laptop, & etc. I stop before getting behind the steering wheel, collecting data on locale and recollection. I check notes that I keep in my back pocket, and whatever tasks I find that can be done on the instant, I do--for I will surely forget if I put them off for even five minutes.

Sometimes I feel like a game piece on a Monopoly board. I move according to the numbers, look at my cards, follow the directions, plan my strategy. But this is not a game, not a mere amusement--this is walking, thinking, talking, functioning, where poor planning sends you not straight to jail (do not pass Go), but flat on your face at the bottom of the stairway.

No More I Love Yous

I happened to hear a song on the radio this morning--Annie Lennox singing "No More I Love Yous"--and it instantly called forth the period of time just after I had broken up with Jamie, back in 2005. Isn't it odd how music can serve in this sort of mnemonic way, calling forth a sort of encapsulated essence of a certain time? It is more than remembering, recalling details or facts. It is the retrieval of a complex aura of feeling, so whole and accurate in itself that it can actually make your heart ache. In fact, one does not so much recall as he suddenly re experiences. It is not that one remembers and then explores what he remembers; rather, memory comes upon him, more in the manner of revelation. What arrives has not been called forth, but sent.

Strange world, this. Stranger yet the individual in it.

Have you ever smelled something, or caught a glance of something, or heard a sound, and found yourself instantly transported to the very core of another time and place? Suddenly you are five, or twenty-five; suddenly you are in a meadow by a river; suddenly you are sitting with your mother and the Cocker Spaniel on the back porch on a summer day regardless of these many years since they have died.

You smell something--something unnameable, and yet intact, complete--and you are suddenly beside your brother's hospital bed, holding his hand as his life slips away.

You hear a song, this voice, this pitch, and you relive how your heart sank so low, how your breath grew so short, how your soul reached then to the empty air where she had been. You can almost smell her skin again, you can almost touch her hair.

Strange world, strange world. Stranger yet the individual, this man, this woman, this perpetual child whispering well wishes in eternity to the unending cosmos.

Nothing whatsoever has been lost. Nothing ever comes to an end. People only imagine it so.

Our Brief But Final Courtship

My wife and I had three things in common before we got married--before, in fact, we even knew each other. We went to the same nightclub, we attended the same church, and we frequented the same Starbucks. It might be inferred from the preceding that we also lived in the same neighborhood, so I will not count this as a fourth.

It so happens that our first actual meeting took place at the nightclub, but it could have taken place at any of the three locales, and so we tend to use all three in an interchangeable manner, each being equal to the other in potential, depending upon who is asking, why they want to know, our conceit at the moment, and other variables that may come into play.

My wife says that she came to the bar to order a drink. I was sitting on the other side of the bar with a pint of beer (being otherwise single and friendless). She says that when I looked up from my beer (which I tended to do every twenty minutes or so), my hand froze in midair, pint glass poised just in front of my lips, which had also frozen in a posture of readiness (to drink, that is).

I think this description is perfectly accurate. What I remember is looking up and immediately setting my eyes upon the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. So of course I froze. What man wouldn't? Our eyes met, and she smiled, and she raised her glass from across the bar. (As her story goes, I was still frozen solid during this period of time).

Well, she paid for her drink and disappeared into the crowd (and it was a crowd that night, of the shoulder-to-shoulder sort), and I sat there thinking (able to move, I believe, by that time), My God that was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen!).

Next thing I knew, someone was tapping my left shoulder. Somehow she had come all the way around the bar, squeezed on through behind me, and came to rest on my left. She wanted to know if I could give her a light. Now this is curious, because my wife does not smoke, and even if she had been smoking that night, she could no doubt have gotten a light from one of her friends at her own table.

I proceeded to fish through my pockets for the lighter that was sitting on the bar in front of me. She was still smiling, and I could clearly see, now that she was so close, that she was not as beautiful as I had thought, but more beautiful yet. Stunning, in a word (which was having, indeed, the same paralyzing effect on my mouth as before).

I finally managed to ask where she lived (having discovered, at last, the lighter which had been so completely hidden in plain sight).

At the Marriott, she said.

What, the Marriott Hotel? This seemed rather odd. What kind of girl was this? Perhaps I had not heard correctly. Maybe she had said Maryland, or St. Mary's Convent, or I'm married.

No. A second request for the same information elicited the same response.

The Marriott Hotel.

What sort of girl lives in a hotel? Well let's see, she is Asian, so perhaps she is just passing through, from Singapore to Brazil, for instance. Or how about this--maybe she works at the hotel. And lives there too. Or maybe . . . well, there were other possibilities that entered my mind.

But the long and short of it was that I was now frozen by this question of where she lived--my own fault for asking it, for it had been a stupid question to begin with. Before I knew it she was gone again. I looked around the room but could not find her. I looked around the room the rest of the night, but she had vanished.

I was later to learn that it was none of my business at the time where she might live. Thus her answer, The Marriott. Why would your first words to a woman you don't even know be "Where do you live," she asked. "Why would any woman answer that question coming from a complete stranger?"

Why indeed?

This is where our three places in common ends up being fortuitous, affording, as they did, a three fold opportunity to redeem myself. Our meeting at the nightclub took place in the winter of 2007. We were married in May. A year later, almost to the day, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, though that is a different story altogether.

We no longer have our three places in common, for we no longer go to the nightclub, we rarely go to church anymore, and only I have remained faithful to the neighborhood Starbucks. We have now, therefore, nothing whatsoever in common.

Isn't that what marriage is all about?

We do, however, have two dogs together, in joint ownership. These are our children.

And I can tell you this: I am not about to give them up without a fight.

On Our Way Up to Canaan Land, Part II

The sense of all this, as applied to the life of the individual, is intended to be an illustration of how close we are, all our lives long, to the realm of peace, freedom, abundance, and rest otherwise symbolized in the Old Testament as The Promised Land. In the New Testament it is called The New Jerusalem.

My Kingdom is not of this world, Christ says. It is in heaven. Heaven, in fact, is not of this world, and yet it is in this world. It is as near as a breath is near to the lips (the Greek for heaven being often translated as breath).

But if I cast out demons with the finger of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you.

Since the representatives of religion had accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Satan, they made it implicit in their argument that they believed a supernatural power to be at work in Jesus. He had only to finish their own argument to arrive upon the truth--If Satan casts out himself, the how will his Kingdom stand? But if I by the finger of God . . . and so on.

How will the Kingdom of heaven come? So asked the ever obtuse disciples, always so perfectly characteristic of mankind. Will it come by war? Will it come by force of arms, by the crowning of a new King, by fire and destruction, by civil war or revolution?

Not by revolution, but by revelation--and revelation by crucifixion--the overthrowing of all things, a surrender to death itself so that new life may rise.

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.

So it happens that in a world made of illusion and delusion, of pride and arrogance, of lies and conceits and fear, that our eyes are able to open and see very often only through pain and sorrow, through a series of mini crucifixions. We follow the Lord whether we like it or not. We follow whether we intend to or not. For this is life, pure and simple. One cannot live unless he dies, and truly we die daily, as the apostle Paul pointed out.

The core of life itself is composed of irony and paradox. Disease becomes a miraculous setback. In disease the weakness of the flesh is concluded, the pretense of power in the flesh is revealed. We fall back now upon what? Upon what is not flesh but spirit, what is not of this world, but of heaven. Disease becomes a key to health, a map which shows the short way to Canaan. We are not eternal, as we had thought, or had liked to imagine--and yet we see, though through a glass darkly, that something is, and always has been.

This is the blessing of infirmity, the glance afforded through the rent in the veil.

And we begin to hide our eyes no longer.

On Our Way Up to Canaan Land, Part I

One hears often enough from bible preachers how it took the Chosen People forty years to reach the promised land after the escape from Egypt, though it was a journey that could have been made in a matter of days rather than years. The preacher will tell you that this was because they were not ready to enter the promised land. He will tell you, moreover, that the only thing keeping them from a timely arrival at their destination was their stubbornness, their lack of faith.

It appears that the people went everywhere but the promised land during those forty years. They stopped for weeks of feasting on manna, and then on tiny birds. They stopped with parched throats, gasping for water in the middle of the desert (when there was likely a perfectly handy water faucet perhaps a mile further down the road). They stopped to see various marvels--a bitter stream made pure by a fallen tree, a vertical cloud by day, a fire by night, a bronze serpent on a pole which would heal those who gazed upon it, and the radiant face of Moses himself, just down from the mountain, the very sight of which was unbearable to the people. Behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him.

Though God was with the people, it turned out that He made such a racket of thunder and lightening, fire and storm, and spoke, as it were, so loudly, that the people begged Moses to make Him go away, to meet with him thenceforth on one hilltop or another where there would not be such a confounded conflagration every time He and Moses spoke.

Well, the preachers are right. The destination of mankind has never been very far away, and the road has never been other than straight and narrow. It's just that we cannot see it, we cannot bear it. We must through the better part of our lives be wayward children. It is only as we near the end that our vision begins to clear, that the scales begin to fall away, and we find ourselves looking down from Golgotha, having entered at last into love.

Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Happy Birthday To Me

Heard a snippet of medical news on NPR this morning. It seems that a stem cell treatment has been approved for phase 1 treatment of patients with spinal cord injuries, although there are only 10 in this first group.

The treatment has been shown, in animals, to permanently repair scar tissue on the nerve and restore lost function.

Naturally MS comes to mind, since fried nerve tissue is our issue too, but of course repairing the damage already done would not preclude subsequent attacks and new damage.

So I guess maybe this in combination with a way to stop the occurrence of new attacks would be the key.

It is, nonetheless, encouraging news. I do believe that by the time most of us are dead, MS will be a thing of the past. (Actually, given the logic of this last sentence, I can say it will be so with perfect accuracy).

Today is my birthday. For those of you who feel like celebrating, go out and have a whiskey or two on me. Send the bill to the National MS Society.

I am 55 years old. I love almost everything about being 55. I could do without the MS and the MS treatments, and the cognitive deficits, and the MRIs, and the excessive financial stress, and the overwhelming fatigue, and the spastic muscles, and such-like--but otherwise, everything is Jim Dandy.