Having MS is mostly No Fun. Tonight, I finished eating dinner and then felt too tired to do more than sit and stare at the table, hoping that all the dishes would magically dance themselves into the kitchen and put themselves away a la Disney's Beauty and the Beast. No such luck. Unless you count the kids working together to clear the table for me. That IS kind of magical, I guess.
The Doctor took one look at my sagging self and sent me off to bed. At 7pm. I am too tired to argue with him and so here I am, all tucked into bed and making a last ditch effort to salvage my evening by writing on my blog. At least this way, I don't feel like I have completely given up without a fight. There is just something discouraging to me about having more in common with my grandmother than with my peers.
Being in your thirties means you have moved on from that juvenile feeling of invincibility that so many of us suffered from in our teens and into our twenties. Being thirty-something means that you are finally somewhat comfortable in your own skin, you know sort of who you are, and you probably know what you want to be when you grow up.
I somehow skipped over all that. I moved right on past and now find myself more on par with the retired set than with the saving for retirement set. I have always loved visiting with the older people in my life. They have so much life in them and I come away feeling like I have lived something special, if just vicariously. But now I find myself feeling almost as though I am one of them. I find myself comparing the pros and cons of various medical treatments, bemoaning the loss of memory or mobility or energy, or discussing the always entertaining worst procedure stories. I have become old on the inside while remaining young on the outside.
Just this morning my grandma and I joked/complained about the annoyance of having so little energy. We tried to outdo each other with stories demonstrating our fatigue. Mine was that I had put a fitted sheet on our bed but the struggle had worn me out so much that I had to take a nap before tackling the top sheet. It made me think back to my days at my last job when we would swap stories about projects we'd done, trying to outdo each other with tales of unflagging strength, endurance and energy.
It's like I am a two-sided coin. Heads and tails all in one. I used to be heads, always thinking, working, moving. Now, I feel as though I am always tails, lagging behind, resting, waiting. I lay here, all tuckered out and listening to the family whirling around in the other room, and I wonder, will my coin flip again?
I can't begin to know what you are going through, but please know that Dad and I pray for you several times each day, and I know many others do, too. We love you very much, and we think you are very special!
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