Living with multiple sclerosis — both the disease and the symptoms — is a learning process. One, perhaps, that we sometimes don’t credit ourselves enough for progressing through.
Just as the disease itself progresses, so, too, don’t we make progress by finding our way around many of the obstacles it drops in our way?
Still, it can seem like we’re sometimes caught in a loop like a scratched record when it comes to our coping strategies.
We experience a symptom or some other aspect of the disease. We’re sometimes surprised by it. We grieve and mourn, then we find some level of success in coping with the new thing (likely after a few failed attempts). We get used to our new normal, and we move on with another MS-supplied weight in our rucksack of life.
And then it or something like it comes up again, and we start all over. But we don’t start from the same place.
The Cycle Is Not a Perfect Circle
In a recent interview with Radio Kerry, I mentioned the concept of a chronic corkscrew to describe how we tend to find our way in such circumstances.
New symptoms or recurrences of old ones we’ve had before might seem like we’re revolving on some sort of circular cycle of this disease. But in fact, even if it’s the same thing affecting us in the same way, we’re not the same people as we were the first time … or the last time.
We proceed down our life’s path each day: We meet people. We have new experiences. We grow in many aspects. So when something plops us back into our symptomatic circle, we’re further down the linear path of existence, so we react differently, even to the same things.
How I deal with a new or progressing aspect of my disease today is very far removed from how I coped with it before.
Growth and Maturity Change Our Reactions
I’d like to think that much of my growth is of my own accord, that I’ve actively sought out knowledge and tools that help me to better understand and manage. That is true to a good extent. But much in my new way of coping is simply a result of my intellectual and emotional maturity.
These things happen with time, even if we’re not intending them to.
Like a child learning the concept of delayed reinforcement in having to wait for an ice cream helps us to wait for a paycheck at month’s end, or turn-taking games provide a basis for shared conversation and rapport building, we generalize our life experiences to better deal with MS stuff as we age with the disease.
We discard what didn’t work for us before. We remember what was successful last time. Perhaps we overlay something we read or heard from others coping with this or another chronic illness. We focus more on the “can” than the “can’t,” and we loop the loop from shock to healing (or, as in the Kübler-Ross model of grief, from denial to acceptance) in a more efficient and less emotionally taxing evaluation.
Pretty much …
Just like our doctors “practice” medicine, I’ll keep practicing as I live my life on this chronic corkscrew.
Wishing you and your family the best of health.
Cheers,
Trevis
