Would You Care For Some Whine To Go With That Cold??

How was your week?   Mine started out kind of rough:

The day after my last blog post went up I woke up feeling like dirt.  My legs were numb, my vision was screwy, my joints ached, my focus was off.  The fatigue set in and didn’t let up (and let me explain – MS fatigue is a bit like walking around with two or three heavy, wet, wool blankets draped across your body.  Fun, right?!?).   I was a mess.

My first thought was “oh no – I’m having a relapse!”  Then I thought “oh no – I ate something that I shouldn’t have!” (even tho I knew that wasn’t the case, I was just so exasperated to be feeling like shit again after feeling so great for so long I was ready to tell myself anything).

I got Ryann off to school and was busy sitting around feeling sorry for my sorry-ass relapsing self when Betty called.  Almost right away she commented that I sounded stuffy and congested. 

“Yea,” I said, “Ryann’s had a cold for the past few days and now I have it . . . but more importantly, I woke up feeling like shit, I hope it’s not a relapse, I’ve been doing so well and now I’m so disappointed and maybe it’s something I ate but I don’t know I just hope I’m not going backwards waa waa waa”

Betty cut me off mid-whine and, in her usual succinct manner (did I mention she’s an attorney? She’s pretty keen with these things) asked if I thought maybe it was simply the cold that was causing an exacerbation of my symptoms.

I wanted to believe her.  It sounded reasonable.  It was more than likely the case. 

But you know, when you’ve lived with MS for so long, and when you are so used to your body just giving out and letting you down, it’s kind of hard to believe that “it’s just a cold” and you’ll “feel better in a few days”. 

Because with MS, when your symptoms set in, you usually don’t feel better in a few days.  And if you are lucky enough to actually have your symptoms subside months after they’ve started, they almost always leave some lingering reminder like incessant tingling, numbness, achiness, pain, loss of motion – you know, quirky fun stuff like that.

So as much as I wanted to believe Betty’s theory – and as much as I logically knew it made sense that whatever virus I’d caught from Ryann was probably the cause of my overall dirt-like status - it was just so hard to believe.  Could it really be that simple??  Could I just have a cold?

I took it easy for a few days, drank lots of fluids, dosed up on Vitamin D and good, healthy food and by the end of the week I was texting Betty “I feel freaking fabulous!”

Turns out I had a cold.  Turns out that I’m just like the rest of the human race and had a regular old, run of the mill cold.  Turns out that I didn’t have a relapse, I didn’t go backwards, my body didn’t give out on me and I did, in fact, feel better in a few days.

That’s pretty big.  Not much is simple when you live with MS.  But here I am, recovering from MS and I had a cold and it went away.  Simple as that.

Life is good.

"Life shifts up and down everybody knows it's wrong."

                                                                    --Skinny Puppy