When last we met our heroine, she had just been given a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and had begun to ponder what that would mean for her future …

Back on that fateful day of diagnosis (three days before my twenty-fifth birthday, incidentally), it actually came as something of a relief to finally be able to put a name to the symptoms that had begun increasingly to plague me.  The neurologist spent a fair bit of time with me explaining the basics of MS–including his opinion that if you’ve got to have an autoimmune neurological condition, MS is the one to have–and he gave me a prescription for prednisone to start taking that day.

The prednisone helped clear up my walking issues within relatively short order (it took about three weeks until I was back to normal, I’d say), and once I was feeling better I went back to the neurologist for a regular appointment.  It was then that we discussed in detail the options for ongoing treatment, and we decided that I should begin interferon therapy, taken in the form of weekly injections.  Self-adminstered injections.  In the muscle.  Egad.

So in July of 1998, I had a home-health nurse ’round, and she taught me how to give myself a shot deep in the thigh.  I did that once a week for 2½ years, and I have to say that it never really got any easier.  Each time I sat with the needle poised above my leg, instants away from the jab, I thought to myself, I can’t do this.  But I did.  Not that it seemed to help any.

For those 2½ years after my diagnosis and before I moved to Sweden, I had anywhere from three to six MS flare-ups per year.  Most often they were centered on my left leg, and there were times I had to resort to using a cane to get around, which was as tough psychologically as it was physically.  One time I had a spell of optic neuritis that left me barely able to see, and along with that went some crazy vertigo.  I had to wear an eye patch for a week or two to stop the double vision and to keep me from throwing up every time I turned my head.  That was fun.

I also had a lot of sensory symptoms (burning in the arms and legs, numbness and tingling, “phantom” pain and itching that nothing would help), and those did not necessarily go away between flare-ups.  In fact, throughout my years with MS, sensory disturbances have been the one constant.  The rest of the symptoms come and go, but I’ve almost always got some sort of “abnormal” sensation in an arm or leg or foot or hand.

Anyway, in the spring of 2000 I started having a really rough time.  Stress is generally the number-one catalyst for MS attacks, and I was under a tremendous amount of stress, from many and varied sources.  I really can’t even go into details, because just thinking about that period of time stresses me out too much.  I had, at least, split from the crazy and useless husband several months after my diagnosis, but he continued to cause me no end of emotional agony, and most other things in my life were just. not. good. at that point.

That entire summer felt like one long flare-up, and by the end of it I was able to work at my data-entry job only about ten hours a week.  I just could not handle the sitting and the typing, and when the optic neuritis episode rolled around I couldn’t do my job at all.  I had burned through my sick leave and vacation time quickly, and by the time September came along, I was working so little that my paychecks amounted fifteen or twenty dollars.  Something had to give.