My Christmas heroes
Those who willingly and therefore as blindly as I was, kept walking beside me are the heroes in this fourteen year long tale of chronic illness, daily wretched pain and forgiveness, of daily adaptation and understanding.
Eyes of sorrow
"I am utterly afraid of losing my eyesight completely. The pleasure I assign to them is felt every minute of every day. Reading a book, watching the sun set behind the mountains, seeing a flower open during the day, catching those few rays of sunshine in grey clouds… I am often in awe of the images my eyes capture and send to my brain. These images tease and taunt, are overjoyed or full of sorrow, want more or have enough."
#strongerthanms with MS Ireland
“So, how’s the book,” friends often ask me. “Oh, it’s getting there,” I joke. “I’ve finished one page, the one with the title and my name!” I don’t lack the ambition to keep on writing, but I have an overabundance of low energy levels, so I must ask people to use their patience… patiently when dealing with me. Like all cowards, the illness I write about lurks in the dark within my central nervous system, and it sometimes rises to the surface in unflattering ways. My body does a good job in concealing it for now, but every so often I worry about it rising to the surface and staying there… permanently.
That daily fight
Sometimes it seems that the hardest battles you will ever have to fight will be the battles with yourself. You strive to get through hours of hard grinding for upcoming exams, or you want to get fit after Christmas and New Year’s parties. We’ve all been there, and the older you get and the harder you seem to try, the more difficult it gets. I’m no stranger to being my own worst enemy when it boils down to fighting health issues. As years go by, and the wiser I should become, I simply cannot turn it into a ‘Remember when I finally learned my lesson?’ After my MS diagnosis in 2005, I told my ex-employer and ex-colleagues countless times, ‘This time I know what to do and next time I…