Atypical Multiple Sclerosis

Anger seems to be a byproduct of chronic diseases. I haven’t met one person yet who has never felt or shown anger. Now add the stress of a life changing chronic disease and anger sprouts; grows better than flowers surrounded by manure.  Sometimes that, flower surrounded by manure, is exactly how I feel – not in a good way. 

It is this anger that really surprised me. As you know, I spent a while and several docs trying to get diagnosed, trying to get help.  So when for various reasons these docs would not help me, I felt anger. Angry that these learned people refused to help me; I know if they refused me then they also refused to help other people. That made me angry. After I didn’t got to medical school, take the Hippocratic oath: which basically says if you can’t help then don’t hurt. 

So when you need help, you reach out to someone who can help you and they refuse, you normally feel anger. That anger I knew. We are always getting mad at someone. There is a perceived valid target for the anger. Logically, we know that anger makes no sense, isn’t helpful, and isn’t productive. But anger is a response we are taught and feel righteous expressing at someone or some situation.

But that isn’t the anger that surprised me. That isn’t the anger of chronic disease as I know it. Within six months I went from a snowboarding, mountain climbing mother to a couch potato unable to move due to weakness, fatigue and spasticity. So you say, well thats a situation worthy of anger.

Yes, maybe, but I was angry at other people and it surprised me. The first time I exhibited this anger and surprised myself, I was a passenger in a car driven by my mother.  And true to statistics-most accidents happen within a mile of home-my mom was driving me home and we were about three quarters of mile away when I witnessed it.

It was a woman jogging. A woman jogging and listening to music while pushing her baby in a stroller. A sight seen on most streets everyday-typical. Only I was dealing with atypical multiple sclerosis.  Watching that woman jog toward our car, or our car careening toward that woman, all I could think about was how much I hated her. How much I hated her because she do something I could no longer do. How much I hated her because she will get to run around with her child AND I couldn’t anymore.  I blurted some expletives that catching my mother by surprise, catching me by surprise. The depth of that anger embarrassed me, caught me off guard.  I guess I must have been feeling it but didn’t want to admit it.

It was that anger, that much anger at someone I didn’t know, doing something they thoroughly enjoyed that didn’t hurt anyone, that changed my life. Changed my life almost as much as MS.

I reflected on that anger for awhile, wondering where it came from, why did it come out at that moment, how to rid myself of that anger. In order to rid myself of that anger I really needed to understand it. Before MS I would roll with punches. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like I didn’t get angry. I did. But I would adapt and move on. This time the anger scared me, it was unprovoked, aimed at an innocent person, and I had trouble controlling it.

That one moment in my life changed me. I felt like atypical chronic progressive multiple sclerosis had robbed me of the rest of my life. I had to admit that and it’s tough trying to be mad at a disease, I mean the disease is in your body, it is a part of you. What are you going to do-be mad at yourself for getting a disease you had no control over.

See that’s the rub-expectations. Seems when I don’t have control and things spin in a direction that is unexpected anger happens. So, that one moment of complete hatred and anger at that woman innocently jogging with her baby changed my life. I still have ms, I still have a chronic disease, but it put me on a path, a journey of understanding.