Gifts await us all

Many thins can be said of the MS experience, but "dull" isn't one of them.

I got asked by this MAJOR university to re-jigger a chorus+orchestra piece of mine into a chorus+wind ensemble, zero strings! The sort of challenge I have heretofore always enjoyed! But nowadays, what I'm definitely not enjoying is shoddy hand control, dealing with the mouse and keyboards so very poorly. Very, very poorly... More info after I survive  the experience and deliver the finished product.

Yesterday, in other news but still speaking about the "hand crappiness"... Trying to write something on a piece of paper, I couldn't control my right hand well enough to put the pen onto the paper, much less control it well enough to write something recognizable as letters, much less as actual words.

Let's not go into the difference in experience between typing 100 words per minute--yes, timed and everything, that's really how fast I used to type--and the left-hand only, often poke-one-key-at-a-time, never look at anything other than the keyboard with occasional "Oh sh-t, I just typed that?" moments in stolen glances at the screen...

But here's the capper for the last few days: A friend of mine e-mailed me yesterday about how his wife has this nasty, nasty, thing growing in her brain which, if she's lucky, is in an operable place and, with today's disco surgery, might actually get removed and her problem solved! A similar thing happened with my own mother... she spent the day in disco surgery, I saw her the evening that she came out of the recovery room and got back to her hospital room, and within a couple of hours after leaving surgery, she looked better. Yes... better!

I haven't figured out how to tell them that, from my particular lane of the Neuological Highway, she's in great shape. Two reasons: they can point to what's wrong, and if they take it out, she gets better.

MS doesn't work that way.

Oh well.

But one never knows... Gifts come in the most surprising ways, from the most surprising places.

And all of us can certainly benefit from saying farewell to that which we do not need, whatever form it may take.

Gifts await us all. In the most amazing ways.