Archive for September 18th, 2011
health update
I have been rather lucky recently in that I haven’t had a major MS flare-up in over a year, but I’m becoming more and more disillusioned about being diagnosed with MS anyway. Here’s why.
I get this terrible itching on my right elbow. It comes and goes for no apparent reason. It was so bad a couple weeks ago that I went to CVS on my lunch break and bought a tube of cortisone cream. I never imagined it would be MS-related. It turns out that ‘itching’ is an infrequent symptom of MS, and here’s the best part: topical creams are totally ineffective. I might as well have rubbed Nutella on my elbow for all the good it did me.
The list of symptoms for MS is almost endless. Fatigue. Numbness. Sexual dysfunction. Depression. Itching. Pain. No, seriously, fucking ‘pain’ is a symptom. How much more nebulous can your condition be when ‘pain’ is a symptom? Almost anything that can go wrong with the human body can be considered a symptom of MS. Sometimes it seems like MS is all symptoms with no known underlying cause. I’m no doctor but an MS diagnosis itself seems like medical shorthand for “we have no idea what the fuck is wrong with you.”
And because medical science has no idea what MS is, they don’t have any real way to treat it. It’s fucking immensely frustrating. I can take drugs in the hope of not getting a flare-up, but there’s nothing I can take to make it go away. No penicillin. No chemo. Nothing. Imagine that you went to the doctor and said, “Hey, I’m pissing blood. What’s up with that?” And your doctor said, “Well, I don’t have any idea why you’re pissing blood, but take this drug and maybe you won’t piss blood as often.” I think that you might be pretty mad.
Right now I’m lucky. My right toe is numb, my arms tingle and I’m wicked sensitive to air-condioning, but I can function pretty much like normal. Every once in a while I check in on MS websites and read some horror story of people who are so disabled that they have to quit their jobs and I count my blessings. It’s almost enough to get me to try some crackpot hookworm therapy.
