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.
Sounds like an endless list of annoyances. You are handling it better than I would though. I get annoyed when just my allergies are bad.
I would say something like, “Just do something relaxing like watching a Red Sox game…” but after the last few weeks the team has had, you are probably better off with the hookworm therapy.
corey126
23 September 2011 at 12:55
Have you tried black pepper?
sox68
25 September 2011 at 15:31
As I understand it from my friend Peter’s experience having MS, you are basically allergic to your own nervous system. It’s *why* you are this way that no one understands yet. So the things that tend to help the most are things that quiet down immune-system overaction – like prednisone. But as no one knows why the immune system is in high gear towards the wrong things, no one knows yet how to turn it down. Childhood diabetes (which my friend also had and has, interestingly) is a variation on this. The body decides to attack the pancreas, and insulin production goes out the window.
I’ve suffered off and on over the years with eczema, probably the most benign auto-immune disorder. Trying to understand how it starts and what stops it has been more intriguing than a murder mystery. I’ve been told by several doctors it is officially incurable and that I will always have it, but this is not true. There have been long stretches of my life when I’ve had no symptoms at all. “Stress” is a way over-simplification. After thinking hard about this for over thirty years, I believe that the body gets out of whack in reaction to some initial shock or stimulus, and forgets how to put itself right. Ergo, I think some sort of subliminal suggestion to divert its pathological overreaction helps. It has even occurred to me that we may be chimeras – those people who have two different sets of dna because two eggs combined in the womb. Something triggers an allergic reaction to the less dominant set. But stands to reason something causes this, and someday the cause will be found.
Meanwhile, Peter has found acupuncture helps him a lot. He’s also gotten good relief lately from a wheat germ supplement for Vitamin D, suggested by a chiropractor.
ptb
2 October 2011 at 20:02
OK shithead – write this shit(head) shit in some lyrical form WILL YOU?!
Pick up a loud guitar, preferably somewhat in tune, and believe that the sounds will actually ultrasonically take away any pain, itch, pain, crap, numbmess, pain, etc. etc. WILL YOU?!
DeeDee Double Yew
11 February 2012 at 00:24