I guess that is a very personal issue. It depends on how you deal with and dwell on things. I can't go, right now, a day without thinking about MS, but I am in research mode and it is very new to me... in a way. When my dad died, I thought there would never come a day that I didn't think of him being gone. Well, there are plenty of days that I don't think of the fact that he is not here with me.

I had gastric bypass. I thought, because of the lifestyle changes it has on my life, that I would never go a day without that being in my mind... that I had surgery to re-route my insides to lose weight. There are plenty of days that I don't think about that.

I try and live in the here and now. I admit everyone can do that differently, and am not trying to put down anyone with their way of dealing with life. Right now, in the moment... MS doesn't need to be the highlight of my life, so I push it back. Eventually, it will drop off my radar until it needs to be there. But, that is how *I* am.

*THIS* is a reason I am big on not being labeled... and why it took me 8 years to allow myself to get this label. Once you have it, if it is on the forethought of your brain, then it is going to affect you in some manner.

My daughter came to me with 3 labels that was placed on her before she was 9. She had the labels of ADHD, bi-polar disorder, and mental retardation. She was on 3 heavy duty medications. I took her off of every one... and have not had ONE issue with her that could not be handled with proper discipline and higher expectations. I did not continue to label this child, because before she came to us, she lived up to her labels, because they were expected and used to dismiss her behaviors. Now, she has no label to fall back on. She is an A-B student (she is in main-stream classes, although not in the grade children her age are in), whose behaviors have pretty much gone away. The only behavior left is she is very talkative (can't imagine who she gets that from ).

I don't want to live with a label. I can live with a disease, and deal with it when I have to, but living with the label means thinking about it every day, and living up to everything is says (oh my, am I tired, is it from my MS - no, it is because I have worked 80 hours this week, my leg hurts, is it my MS - no, it is cause I ran 3 miles instead of 1 yesterday...ext)

Do I make sense?

I do want to make one thing clear. I am not trying to put down ANYone with this post... we all deal with things our way, and to each his own... this is just my way