Kate Winslet

 

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

 
14 October 2022
The sails of the tallship 'Tenacious' unfurled at night. Lit only by moonlight against the sea.

Briefly Escaping a Progressive Illness

So I know I’m lucky. I have a wonderful family and close friends. I made it to 53 before medical retirement and after an amazing career. I keep getting wonderful representation and speaking opportunities out of the blue. So, despite Kate Winslet *still* not having picked up the telephone, all in all I’m having a stonking time. But having an overwhelmingly shitty disease pretty shittily is shitty nonetheless. I’m proud to be disabled, proud of how I handle it. I just need a break from it every so often. Adrenaline JunkieOutside family and friendship fun, my general approach to escaping Multiple Sclerosis is to pursue ‘heavy nonsensing’. The scarier the better. Adrenaline rocks! With the help of organisations like Http://www.Sportability., […]
30 March 2021
Brain atrophy but Mars Attacks!

My Multiple Sclerosis’d brain is shrinking!

One of the technical terms I use to describe MS damage to the central nervous system in my brain and spinal cord is ‘icky’. That covers everything off pretty well. My own sodding immune system is wading into the protective sheath around my nerves and leaving permanent scarring, hardening and damage. Not strategically or predictably. Totally randomly. My immune system ‘bomb runs’ show up on MRI scans like small blobs of cotton wool or some well-chomped, discarded chewing gum. Icky. Classics lesson for you: ‘Sclerosis’ comes from the Greek σκληρός sklērós, “hard”. (ie ‘hardening’, ‘scars’, ‘ewww’) Doubly icky is the knowledge that my actual brain is shrinking. ‘Brain atrophy’ is, I think, the proper term. Happens to us all as […]
19 March 2021

Me and the President of the United States. And Multiple Sclerosis.

Once upon a time, in an era so far away it should be in black and white, I took no interest in US politics… Presidents would only waft across my consciousness when starting wars or teaching me the word ‘impeach’ by making a mess of a dress and an intern’s life… (younger readers: Google ‘Clinton’, ‘Lewinsky’, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’. And please behave when you rule the world.) Then came a breath of fresh air and a brief, delicious taste of diversity in power with Barrack Obama. I got interested and started to vaguely pay attention.   I was even more excited when former fighter pilot President Whitmore played a key role in defeating a […]