Numb

Hmm, I wonder why my leg has been asleep for so long. 

A familiar thought. It's quite similar to

Hmm, I wonder why my vision is blurry in one eye. 

The answer is as plain as the nose on some ugly motherfucker's face, and yet it does not occur to me immediately.

The tingling, the burning. That's normal, right? The thought frees my mind so that I'm able to ruminate on whether or not I'm dying of cancer.

Having MS really is, in a sense, like being a battered wife. You never know when the brute will backhand you across the face. I'm actually lucky, in that my ball-and-chain seems only to get violent every few years. And even then, all he does is burn me with a cigarette or punch me in the eye, just to remind me that he could, at any time, put me in a wheelchair.

Of course, there's always false hope. Maybe it really is asleep, or maybe I have a problem with my circulation. But, my experience is that, although this disease is a mealy-mouthed serpent with all kinds of sensory illusions up his sleeve, there are some symptoms that seem to bear his trademark. The tingling numbness, the fuzzy feeling of disappearing, the almost perceptible nerve damage -- it all just reeks of him.

I would, needless to say, love to dump him: serve him with divorce papers before strapping a pipe bomb to his car. He's inside me, though; he is me. He is my defect. He is why I ought to have been returned to the lot.

I know I should be grateful, and I am. I've spent nine years being grateful as fuck that it isn't worse. Sometimes, though, you've got to tell the truth about things, and take a break from suckling at the teet of positivity.

27.10 edit: I can still walk. Having thought about it, I'm doing pretty damn well.