Thank you for such caring thoughts, Friend. Sorry, kinda long.
I can so totally relate to what you say. I have days too where I am discouraged, or I get angry about things I cannot control. Did you say you have MS?? Wow. I just feel fortunate to have what I have when I think of MS and all it entails. I applaud your upbeat personality, and you are certainly a fighter. Please share anything you want with me.
Funny, doctors still cannot really say WHAT is going on with my motor signs, just that it is higher up, maybe because they just don't know WHERE this is going. It is possible that now that I am aging, I am showing some Bulbar signs from the polio that weren't troublesome before -- choking on food, gagging, some kind of weird sob reflex sometimes when I am talking. I have choking episodes at night. I am only slightly wondering about a sporadic-like ALS.
I live in an Independent Retirement Center, a huge 5-story building, love it. I'm on the 5th floor over-looking Tinker Air Force Base. My chronic pain goes from the base of the back of my head all the way down to my tailbone, and my limbs are all achey and nasty, yuk, painful stuff. It has been called ridiculopathy. Well, that is just another "symptom," part of my soup pot full of symptoms and symptomology, blah, blah, blah -- not the actual ailment diagnosis.
All day long, I have spasms and jerks that turn into full-blown muscle charley-horses, that start in my toes and move up to my ribcage if I don't stop them. When I stop moving and rest, the twitching and muscles moving under the skin starts and then -- BAM!! -- a charley horse like you wouldn't believe. I guess my Upper Motor signs, the Spasticity and Clonus and Hyperreflexes is giving me trouble. I have Complex Partial Seizures, so some of this jerking is a Static, spikes on my EEG. Some spasms last over 20 minutes, and I can't figure out how my toes do that! They bend funny and stick together and distort and oh my, the spasms is the only thing that makes me cry out, and just sit there and whimper.
Bio-Feedback techniques: I focus on a finger or other part of my body that is not in pain, and I relish it. I pet my pup and comb her hair, take her for a walk, tease her, play with her -- my pain subsides. I flip through TV channels, flip, flip, flip... cruise, very relaxing. I enjoy colors and the sky and looking at shops and people when I am on the bus. I laugh at funny things, jokes, whatever. I talk to God. I also apologize to God almost everyday for living a necessary, rather selfish, self-centered, isolated life, but it is the only way I can deal with this, and it does get lonely. This is a bad one, lol, but I ask questions out loud to myself, and then answer myself
-- all part of coping.
Take care, Friend, Have a Great Sunday.
LaVerne
*To everybody on the List* -- Have a Wonderful Day
