Smile, You're on Candid Camera!

As I look back I have to wonder how many MS symptoms I have had that I have mistakenly attributed to the fact that I am 48 years old and at a ripe old age to begin the "change". How funny that it is referred to as the "change". I think I enjoy typing that. I find it hysterical. Maybe I am just having the MS giddies, but typing the"change" almost makes me roll on the floor. What exactly are we changing into?

My brain has been playing word games with me for some time now. It sort of reminds me of the game Boggle where you get a bunch of random letters and have have an allotted amount of time to make a word out of those letters. In my brain, I am given a bunch of words and each of them mean almost the same thing and somehow I have to figure out which one is best suited to what I am trying to say. I can't always do this, and as a result I may replace the correct word with one that jumped onto the tracks and hijacked my thoughts as the sentence was traveling from my brain to my mouth. In a second scenario, my brain takes two synonyms and changes them into one word. For instance, night + dark = nark. Yep, in my world nark is a word and it doesn't mean someone who has ratted you out for the drug paraphernalia hiding under your mattress. (For some odd reason spell check keeps trying to tell me that nark is not a word. Let spellcheck live in my brain for a while and we would have a whole new dictionary.)

Last week I asked my cat if he was enjoying his mirror. He is indeed beautiful and he may indeed be vain but he was sitting in a window (big sheet of glass) not sitting in front of a mirror (big sheet of glass).

Maybe it is just the "change" (I'm laughing again) that is causing this. I'm not sure. I do know that my very first visible lesion was in my brain and uncomfortably close to the little speech gizmo up there.

The Big Bang came when the numbness started in my leg. (See Blog Archive for September, It Starts.) Along with the numbness came a few more details that I failed to mention in It Starts.

I am a hot bath kind of gal. No shower for me unless it is a very hot day and I have possibly been doing yard work all day or if I am in a big hurry to go somewhere. I really like sinking into a steamy hot bath, stretching out and enjoying it for a while. On the day that I decided I should go to the hospital I had drawn a hot bath for myself. Since I didn't feel great, I could scarcely wait to have that warm water wrap around my body. Due to the position of our bathtub I always step in with my right foot first. My right side was the side with numbness. I had checked the water temperature with my hand as I was filling the tub. It was perfect. Imagine my surprise when I stepped into the bath with my right foot and it felt like I was sticking it into a bucket of ice water! I yanked it back out of there and reached in with my hand again to test the water. It was perfect. I stepped back in and as I lowered myself into the tub my entire right side, up to the top of my ribcage was chilled by the warm water. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone, or like someone was playing a really weird "Smile, You're on Candid Camera" kind of trick on me.

When I got out of the tub, the cool air from the room felt as if it were searing my right side. Yep, definitely time to go to the emergency room.

While in the hospital I had a few sharp pains behind my left ear, experienced some muffled sound in my left ear and slight tingling in the left side of my face and lip. At this point they had told me they suspected MS but had not confirmed it. This new pain frightened me so I called a nurse. My LPN came in and gently asked if I might be having a panic attack. My first thought was how I am usually good at working my way through stressful situations on my own. I don't use meds to calm anything and I felt it unlikely that this was a panic attack. It just doesn't fit in with who I am. My next thought was, neither did I know that I had MS and it had been living in my body for a while, so maybe it was a panic attack.

The LPN didn't seem concerned and yet in my mind I was wondering if all this stuff might have been a stroke. I have a history of high blood pressure, although not very high and yet the word stroke had not been mentioned even one time since I set foot into the hospital. The LPN told me that the RN was busy and that she would be in to speak to me in a while. My pain and muffled ear issues subsided and in a short while the RN came to visit. She was a little older than most of the LPNs and RNs I had come into contact with. She was at least old enough to have a child in college where as most of the nurses were working to pay someone for child daycare. She sat on the edge of my bed in an "I need to tell you something" sort of way and honestly, I don't recall a word she said except for something about Valium and MRI. I finally said to her very bluntly, "They think I have MS" and she said very soothingly as she looked at me with eyes filled with compassion, "I wasn't sure if you had been told the diagnosis". Not suspected DIAGNOSIS, but DIAGNOSIS! Well now, that pretty much summed it up for me.

Just a side note: I had at least a week or two before the Big Bang, been experiencing some shivering. Sort of an uncontrollable shiver where your teeth chatter and you feel like you are really nervous about something, but you're not. I thought it was another menopause symptom and began to have new respect for the middle-aged women who reach for Xanax.

Side note #2: After coming home from the hospital and reading a message board for people with MS I found out that a weird internal vibration I had been having periodically for about 6 months is an MS symptom. I had spoken of this vibration to my husband and my sister long before I had an MS diagnosis. I could be sitting in my computer chair and I would just swear I was vibrating. Most of my vibrating was localized to the lower torso and near the groin area. Some of you might think Woo Hoo, now that would be fun! But I am here to tell you, it was not. It was creepy. So don't go and get too excited if you have been diagnosed with MS and think you are going to get some freaky fun out of it. You won't!