Turbulence

Halfway through the first fully MS-related week I've taken off work. It's not working the miracles of recuperation I had hoped for. Frankly, I'm not exactly sure it's doing me any good at all, although I'm quite positive it's doing me more good than the week of work would have done me.

I had to spend a lot of today taking care of a migrainey wife; that took far more energy than I had wanted to spend on... well, pretty much anything, actually. I certainly don't begrudge her the effort I had to spend--God knows, if I needed help, I'd want my spouse to take care of me, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat if she had a relapse and needed me again. But it cost a lot.

I'm way more sensitive than I like. Little noises, little anythings, make me jump. It's pretty uncomfortable. I just took another dose of beta blocker, but those don't seem to be intercepting whatever it is that I'm reacting to.

And oh yeah, the sadness. There's something about how the MS is getting in the way of things I used to do without even thinking, and somehow, I kinda feel like it has been forcing me to face my own death, one tiny piece at a time. I've been dealing with that for a while, but there's a difference between facing the idea of your own death and the actuality of your own death, and I think all of my "good attitude" about the disease has been because I've only been facing it in the abstract. Somehow, taking the step of saying "I need to take this time off because of MS" is forcing me to deal with it in concrete terms, and I feel like I'm teetering on the threshold of a lot of sadness.

Which, in a strange way, I take as a good sign. It's probably a place I have needed to go for a while, but haven't been ready to face. And frankly, I don't know if I am (or if anyone ever really is) "ready" to face it.

The only reason I wish I could face it... is because when I get out of it what I'm supposed to get out of it, maybe it'll go away.

Hope springs eternal.