Last week I was having a bit of a tough go of it. A new symptom has been making itself known — rigidity-induced pain — of late, and it’s wearing me out. As it’s not a neuropathic pain, I have been doing what I can (stretching, massage) to try and reduce (if not alleviate) it without medication.
We’re getting there, but the process is long.
A Quick Lie-Down Becomes a 3-Hour Nap
Well, one day, it wasn’t responding to any of my interventions. Lying down and putting my feet up was my self-prescription. As many of you will know, pain can really suck the energy from a person. It caught up with me that afternoon and I woke from an unexpected sleep about three hours later. And I woke in a bit of a daze.
I try to keep my multiple sclerosis (MS)–forced naps to 20 minutes. When I know I need a rest due to fatigue, I often use what I call a “coffee nap” by having a coffee and then lying down for a quick kip. The caffeine kicks in about the time I need to wake so that I don’t slip into REM sleep and muck up my chances at a good night’s rest later.
I wasn’t expecting to fall off that afternoon. I just needed to put my feet up and, perhaps, meditate a bit on relieving the pain. Hence my blurriness when I woke.
And then I remembered: I had a very important meeting that afternoon — a meeting that had started 45 minutes previously!
I’d slept through phone calls and email notifications. Dammit!
How to Recover After a Slip-Up
I didn’t want to call any of my team who would be in the midst of this gathering. (And again, this was a really important meeting — one we’d waited almost a year to get.) All I could do was send an email with profuse apologies and wait to see how it went.
Thankfully, my colleagues are top class, and everything went off without a hitch. The importance of surrounding yourself with competence in case of the unexpected was brought home to me, once again. And so was the unpredictable nature of this disease.
And then the guilt set in.
I apologized to everyone, multiple times, and then I did it again. I felt like I had failed them (and myself, but falling short for them was worse). I began to question whether or not I should even take on such responsibilities due to my MS and that’s, perhaps, one of the most difficult aspects of this disease; the self-doubt it has inflicted.
Self-Doubt Stings the Most
It’s not the first time that I’ve fallen short of my own expectations because of MS. It’ll probably not be the last time either. But this one stung in a way previous times haven’t in the past and that I hope will not happen again. It struck from a blind side, and I’m still reeling from the blow.
Multiple sclerosis has hit just about every aspect of my person and my life over the past 22 years. It’s been a good long time since my self-confidence was collateral damage in this fight. I hope it will be a long time before said self-confidence takes more MS shrapnel, because it sometimes feels like that last bit of myself that is still the “old” me.
Wishing you and your family the best of health.
Cheers,
Trevis
