Sometimes it’s fine. But other times the cursor seems to stick in one place, and I can’t get on with the job at hand. When that job is my next book, it can be annoying. That it happens on and off and then on again — well, that’s just “MS annoying.” I had to bring it in because even though it’s still an intermittent problem, it was getting more frequent. I’ve also had an old, on-again, off-again multiple sclerosis symptom not go “off again” for the past few months. And I almost miss that annoyance of intermittence.
In the Doctor’s Office, Symptoms Hide
Like with my laptop, come-and-go MS symptoms — the ones many of us first experienced before being diagnosed — are some of the toughest to diagnose. The tech guy couldn’t get the problem to happen while he played with the computer, and I didn’t really have the time (nor budget) for him to play around with it for the day. So I left with an external mouse to try to bypass what he suspected was a faulty sensor in the touch pad. You guessed it: As soon as I got home not only did the problem start again, but the “fix” didn’t fix it, either. How many times have many of us left a doctor’s office with this or that prescription, diagnosis, or even lack of diagnosis only to find that the patch was far from effective?
Intermittent Is Annoying; Permanent Can Be Worse
But that’s just one stage of dealing with MS symptoms. When the intermittent symptoms become forever symptoms, they go from annoying to concerning. Sure, we learn to live with them as part of the constant background noise of our disease, but as an open window is first covered with a screen, then a curtain, then the window closes, we eventually realize that it’s also been locked. I’ll miss the breeze coming in that window. An old, dear friend used to say, “Better bad breath than no breath,” and he wasn’t wrong. Weakness that makes me fall now and again (and again, and again) is better than the total loss of those legs. Not knowing if I’ll wake with burning, neurogenic pain down my leg or if that pain will go away if I do wake with it isn’t pleasant. That pain being my constant companion is even less so. A pesky dark or cloudy spot in the field of vision is a pain in the arse. But when that eye is lost to optic neuritis for good, we lose a level of independence. MS symptoms come, and MS symptoms go, but sometimes they come and they stay. And that’s when I find myself longing for the “good old days” of when they went away, even if only for a little while. Wishing you and your family the best of health. Cheers, Trevis
