The waiting game

So I don't have the attitude of Alright Tit, and I often lack Billygean's elegance, but I think both blogstars would agree: waiting is balls.

After the two hour MRI, which I'm still telling people about like it's some kind of long distance athletic accomplishment, one of my dear friends flew in from Seattle for a weekend diversion. We had a great time strolling downtown in the gorgeous summer weather, oogling the throngs coating the beaches, and eating so much that I'm still not hungry 24 hours after she left. For the most part, I forgot about the impending diagnosis (or the equally unnerving possibility of no diagnosis at all). Still, every time we passed someone in a wheelchair, I had to look away. As we rode the bus to dinner, a woman our age got on with a cane, and her partner stood like a shield in front of her as she took a seat in the crowded aisle. I wondered if she had MS, a thought I'd never had before when I saw a perfectly healthy looking young person carrying a cane.

Of course, there are morbid perks to the possibility of having a serious lifelong illness (god, I hate typing that phrase). It's much easier to justify the $30 dangling-to-my-ribcage necklace at Urban Outfitters: "Well, I have to look good now, and why shouldn't I?" I can eat my face off at the tapas bar: "Screw it. I might have MS: I'm ordering a second plate of potatoes with garlic aoli." I also don't abstain from beer, chocolate, ice cream, loads of pasta; since I'm sweating buckets at the gym these days, fearing I won't be able to work out like this in the future, I'm suddenly able to bump up my carb load by a factor of ten or so.

Still, I'm already sick of answering well meaning inquiries about how I'm feeling -- you might know the ones, the kind where there's a lingering silence after you say, "Fine," where you know the person asking expects you to say more or break into some swan song about the end of your happiness. Fuck that. I am fine, and in the moments when I'm not I have a handful of the most supportive friends in the world to carry me through (not to mention a husband with infinite love and patience and an ability to know that when I snap at him, I'm not actually snapping *at* him). Sure, I have moments of sheer terror when I see people with limited mobility and can't shake the worst-case scenarios that come stampeding through my thoughts. I get mad, at my brain mostly, for acting so fucking perfect when all this time it's been wearing away in spots. (Though please, brain? Continue with the act. You're doing a lovely job.) I'm not in the mad-at-fate mode yet, probably because we still don't really know what's going on. 

I can't decide what I want to hear tomorrow, when SG and I go in first thing to meet with my neurologist. There's a specialist I hadn't planned on having at 29, or really ever. If the cervical-thoracic MRI is abnormal, I'd probably start on self-admistered injections for MS right away. Whatever you do, when facing a diagnosis that involves shots, don't Google it. Now I just have mysterious but shudder-inducing phrases like "injection site necrosis" joining the Thought Stampede. So there's that possibility, which makes me want a clean MRI. If it's clean, though, we probably move onto a second spinal tap (fuck fuck fuck) or -- possibly worse -- just waiting until something in my body catches up with my brain. Oh hell, that's not something I want to consider. 

Fortunately, there's the French Open on, and I have rhubarb jam and carrot cake muffins to whip up in the kitchen. I might just slurp down an afternoon G&T while I'm watching the stove. Hey, gotta use the excuse for all it's worth, right?

Comments

[taobaoseeker]

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[Justin Bieber Shoes]

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