A good life (honestly!) with Multiple Sclerosis…

I work (for now), I love, I live, I have fun. Just with wheelchairs and drugs and spasms and stuff...

23 March 2020

I’m stockpiling too! Just on anxiety, not bog-roll and pasta…

It’s a bizarre time to be alive, is it not? I do wonder how everything since the ‘credit crunch’ will be written up by future historians. They’ll be looking back from their floating homes and edible sofas, wondering what the bloody hell we were up to. I dunno. But I know it won’t be the ‘era of empathy’. Despite countless moments of courage and kindness these last days. Hoarding and ‘last nights out’ all squidged together seem to be way too fashionable. Right now I sit tapping from my wheelchair, knowing I am classed as ‘vulnerable’ to Covid-19. And wondering if that means I will be looked after. Or discarded? As the Coronavirus tragedy started to emerge, I could have […]

20 February 2020

What has Disability Ever Done For me?

That was a poorly timed Monty Python joke of a title if you weren’t sure… RIP the spamtastic Terry Jones. And he’s not even in this picture. Oops. I so wish I wasn’t disabled. I wish to the depth of my spasms I didn’t have Multiple Sclerosis. It hurts on so many levels, it’s relentless and it is utterly, mind-bogglingly exhausting. But do I wish life were different? Nope. I am delightedly, delightfully, deliciously, dottily married. We have two stupendous children. A lovely extended family. I am knicker-droppingly‌ gorgeous. Obviously. If balding, ageing and sometimes smelly. What more could I want? (Crème brûlée more often possibly, if I am being picky?). I was prompted to think this through […]

3 December 2019

Is Blogger’s Block a thing? It is now. Thanks, messed up brain…

So, legions of adoring fans, I haven’t written for a while. ‘Lesions’ of adoring fans, if you know your MS stuff and like a bad pun. The complaints at my deafening silence have been flooding in. Not really. Am not sure anyone has noticed. Hey ho! I have lots of draft blogs which are nearly there, honest… Writing and thinking is therapy anyway, and probably stimulation for my foggy brain. ‘Cos that’s what it is. Foggy. Cloudy. Hazy. As if I were simultaneously a brain forecaster for Mark Webb and for UK weather. I can confidently predict more mist and storms to come. With rare but glorious clear spells. Look at me sat in a wheelchair and you guess, correctly, […]

21 July 2019

Since When Was I Disabled?

My short-term memory may be shot to pieces by Multiple Sclerosis and hardly helped by chronic fatigue. Yay, I can blame everything on MS! But my long-term one is crystal clear. I can vividly remember the first time I mentioned the word ‘disabled’ about myself, and it was a fight to get the words out: Costa Coffee, Leighton Buzzard. 2009 perhaps, two years after diagnosis. Ordered myself a Latte and a Tiffin (that’s rich chocolate and crunched biscuit naughtiness for the uninitiated). And realised as I ordered that I was having a particularly wobbly day. Only half the coffee would reach the table if I carried it. “I’m slightly disabled, do you mind bringing the coffee to my table?” I […]