You never know how strong you are…
One of the most emotional journeys you could go on, is meeting yourself along the road of a diagnosis you never wanted to happen. It will make you, shape you and perhaps take you somewhere you don’t want to go, but for now, you have to. You lose a parent, a brother or sister, or someone else you dearly loved, and yet time goes on. Time has to go on. For your family, for yourself. Years later you realize you went through that loss maybe a bit better than you ever thought you would. Because being strong was the only option you had. Being diagnosed with an illness that can’t be cured is a little bit similar. Or is it? The day I received my multiple sclerosis diagnosis is a…
The road well traveled
It’s always nice when people see positive changes in you, especially when they took a long time to manifest. A famous quote goes that “happiness is a journey, not a destination” and there is definitely some truth in that. Despite a few minor setbacks on a health level, I’ve sailed through my main illness this year without hospital stays or urgent medical care. As I’m writing this blog post I am balancing an ice pack between the back of my head and the couch to numb a headache and eye pain, and aside from a few bouts of major fatigue and nerve pains throughout the year, I am now, I believe, in the best physical state since quitting my job in December 2009. The fatigue, neuropathic pains, forgetfulness and tremors…
Captain Jack is back!
Oh yes he is… or rather: she is! Or I am… With quite a captain-look. Black eye patch hiding an eye so desperate to jump out of its socket and an eye that is telling me to stay away from reading, writing and watching television. Hhmm… somehow that is quite hard to do in this day and age of audiovisual technologies, and well… my daily life. But not to worry, I’m sure Captain Jack – or moi… – can find some remedy that doesn’t involve over-medicating on painkillers, boxing gloves to punch my hurting eye out, coffee cans of the hottest black stuff or a brain and eye transplant. Right, so what can be done? Double hhmm… Sleep. Dog. Coffee. Ice cream. Although maybe the latter is telling my stomach…
Letting go
Life seems like a joke, out to get you when you least expect it. People disappear from your life, but it’s not until after they’re gone that you realise how much you liked being around them. Or, you understand what being truly happy means because you’ve known absolute sadness. Or you start appreciating silence because you know how loud, annoying and horrible noise can be. Life seems like a joke so; it makes you learn lessons by applying the opposite of what you want. Life is a joke in an ironic way. Murphy’s Law had it in for me years ago. Anything that could go wrong went totally wrong. In the space of 3.5 years I lost part of myself (thank you MS!), and my only sibling, stepdad and four other…
The stalker called MS
In my job I often had to do “root cause analysis” assessments on what went wrong with a certain account and how we could “cure” it again. I miss the term “root cause analysis” and I thought I’d do a one on myself, or my life. What the heck, it’s not like I have anything better to do on another dreary summer’s day in Ireland! I suspect that my illness, the incredibly annoying stalker called Multiple Sclerosis, entered my system through a back door in the 1990s. I have to go back when I worked in a library and I was having the time of my life, so it couldn’t have come at a worse time. I had a period of extreme fatigue and it turned out to be glandular fever…
Welcome to the book fetish club!
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” (Joseph Brodsky) There’s no certainty in life anymore. You can lose your job… just like that; you can be so stressed your heart starts beating much too fast or you can end up in fights even when you tried so hard to avoid having words. But then… there’s your bookcase. That tall, sturdy oak piece of furniture that holds secrets, explains wars, teaches you a foreign language, helps you relax or take you to some imaginary world you wished you could live in. I can sit in my living room, bedroom or any other place where I have books lying around and just look at those books. Enjoy their silence even when their characters scream for…
Dublin: a state of mind
‘Dublin is as much a state of mind as it is a city’ Tom MacDonagh It is, that I can tell you for sure. Dublin has a way of getting under your skin. In a good way and in a lesser way. Dublin is Dublin is Dublin, but sadly Irishness is disappearing from the city.