Multiple sclerosis can be difficult to describe, especially
when a person encounters the MS MonSter firsthand. It’s alarming, befuddling, bewildering, confounding, disconcerting,
distressing, dumbfounding, flabbergasting, jarring, jolting, offensive, prodigious,
staggering, startling, striking, stupefying, surprising, unsettling, upsetting,
and more. MS is shocking.
I’m not talking about the literal physical shocks of those dreaded
electrically-charged evoked potentials tests, which myriad MSers endure (at
least during the initial diagnostic process).
And, for the moment, I’m not describing the heightened
startle reflex so many MS warriors experience. (Don’t believe me? Just make a
sudden and loud noise around one of us, and see what happens. Wait. Don’t do
it. That prank won’t end well.)
MS is simply
shocking.
For lots of MSers, the initial diagnosis absolutely
blindsides us. Sure, we may have experienced some weird and random-seeming
symptoms in the past. Perhaps each of us has had some curious tingling,
spasticity, or numbness in a limb or two, but it seemed to go away by itself.
Maybe we’ve been through bouts of vertigo or inexplicable sudden and severe
fatigue. If the troubles disappeared, we likely put them out of our minds and
went on with our lives.
Everything seemed
fine … till the day it wasn’t.
Tons of MS warriors point to a crazy ambush of sudden
blindness (in one or both eyes) as the springboard for their diagnoses with
multiple sclerosis. Hey, a loss of vision is something a person just cannot
ignore.
That’s how I found out about MS. And it was shocking indeed.
Stepping back a bit, I think it’s fair to say that any
diagnosis of a chronic (and yet uncurable) medical condition would be troubling,
alarming, and shocking – even if it didn’t make the central nervous system intermittently
go haywire.
Eventually, we move from recoiling in shock to learning to
cope with the MS life. But each MS relapse or new symptom still feels somewhat
shocking.
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April A to Z Challenge 2016 logo – fair
use
Adapted from public domain artwork
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