Lived Experience, Oh Wow Do I Have Some Of That!

It may not be the most pretty experience I’ve lived, but that doesn’t lead to important outcomes, does it, the ‘pretty’ and ‘nice’ things in life.

Nice doesn’t teach a person how to pull themselves together and just get on with what needs to be done, no matter what. And pretty doesn’t help dealing things gotten yucky, as they sometimes can.

I have a chronic illness, Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and to be honest, I am currently doing incredibly well with it, especially considering how things were when I was first diagnosed with it, in 2010.

When I was diagnosed with this illness, I was suffering with muscle weakness on my right hand side, so my right arm and right leg both had far less strength in them, walking was difficult, and I suffered from a deep fatigue that felt like it was in my bones.

It was almost more than I could do to stand up to cook our evening meal sometimes, and the heat from the stovetop made things even worse.

But being a writer, I thought and wrote about what I was experiencing, as well as writing comments on a Facebook page for people in South Autralia run by the MS Society here. As well as that, I began a new blog, which focussed on this new (to me) disease.

I was meeting other people also living with Multiple Sclerosis, and learning many things about this disease. Some of that I learnt was no longer true, but the one thing that remained true was that there was no cure for MS.