If you are a motivated person, multiple sclerosis is just another thing you must deal with to accomplish the things you want to do. Just like taxes are one of the costs of doing business, you do your best to minimize its consequences but you cannot overwhelm the taxman. Multiple sclerosis is a fact of your life and you need to deal with it while not constantly wrestling with its well known affects on your energy levels, balance, bladder and so on.
Attitude management has become my most powerful weapon for dealing with the many losses incurred by developing a chronic, progressive disease with no effective treatment. The ideas of Albert Ellis for managing your thinking using rational emotive therapy to overcome problems like depression and hopelessness. Jon Kabat-Zinn contributed several really helpful books about using mindful meditation to escape the chronic pain trap. In my case using the Serenity Prayer for mantra meditation helped drive home the idea of accepting what we cannot change, working on the things we can change. It is a poets way of picking your fights. Pick fights big enough to be meaningful but small enough winnable. Baby steps.
My diagnosis of m.s. took 25 years to be established as the cause of many niggling problems. This time lapse to explanation for multiple symptoms was common prior to the introduction of MRI and if you had other medical problems m.s. is not the first thing a doctor thinks to investigate.
My response to the affects of m.s. prior to a diagnosis was early on was to think it was lack of motivation, depression or lack of character. Turning to the Self-Help Industry for ways to overcome my deficiencies took up hours of reading magical formulas promising to change the lay-about into a dynamic captain o9f industry. It only makes you feel worse when you read that some people have raised themselves from abject failure to a fortune in sales.
After you spend years cursing your lack of ambition and material success some doctor finally realizes you are dealing with a cluster of symptoms that have a name. Meantime you have experience things like optic neuritis with no explanation. Most people living with M.S. have experienced many, many frustrations before they get a diagnosis.
Once diagnosed you have a moment of revelation - finally, an explanation for all your negative attributes that seemed to be laziness and a lack of clearly written SMART Goals according to the self-help books. Now you realize you are not just a slob and momentarily you feel a kind of perverse joy. Ultimately, the second shoe drops: you have a chronic progressive disease with no cure and no effective treatment. You are told there is no known cause other than maybe its an environmental disease caused by toxins breathed for instance, or it is genetic caused by having a mother from Scotland or maybe you have a leaky gut. Try not to worry about the cause, leave it to the scientists you are told. Who can stop asking themselves for an explanation and reeling backwards in your life history for clues.
When you get over the elation and deflation from your diagnosis you begin a long search for ways to live with the disease. You need to find a way to make a living because most of us are robbed of our profession in our most productive years. Stressful employment can be a killer to people with m.s. and everything is stressful. How do you deal with this situation. Adaptability is something that has made the human race so biologically successful. In what ways can you adapt and thrive?
Living one day at a time is a good starting point for dealing with uncertain health and an unknown future:
" Just for today I will be agreeable, will look as well as I can, dress becomingly, talk low, act courteously, criticize no one, not find faults with anything, and not try to improve or regulate anybody but myself."~anon.
This recipe for routine functioning one day at a time comes from the '12 Step' approach to addictions. Alcoholics have a chronic progressive disease that needs to be accepted and dealt with by abstaining from alcohol. It sound sounds simple: to quit, quit. Anyone who has struggled with this physical and psychological addiction can write a book about the difficulties entailed in changing your lifestyle from drinker to totally abstaining.
