Its an odd thing but even the nicest of people in England are fundamentally incapable of coping with news relating either to chronic ill health or death. The people I worked directly with were a 29 year old designer, my line manager, who was shit hot at his design work but had problems on the human-empathy side. He subsequently showed himeself, in my opinion, to have absolutely no idea of how to relate to someone with MS; socially he evaded/blanked me and my wife at a colleague's birthday party and at work it was DDA regulation 'are my needs being met' bullshit and all human interaction went out the window. It was the same with the other web developer. Needless to say the 22 year old junior designer chick couldn't bear to relate to me either.
I wished I'd kept the whole thing to myself.
It occured to me that these people had absolutely no experience of death or serious illness. I found this odd. Scores of my peers at university had comitted suicide, diving out of tower blocks to become one with the concrete below. Others died nefariously, others carelessly on drunken minibus rides. Others mysteriously, their room curtains alight, jumping to their deaths through the window. Others to diseases like meningitis. People died. Death was part of life. Didn't everyone know that? Didn't everyone know someone with a serious disease? Shit. No, I guess they didn't. Utterly incredible to me as three generations ago we laid our dead relatives out in the drawing room to let people pay their respects pre-funeral.
The situation where I was working had become intolerable. I was given the silent treatment, barring work necessities, not out of malice but because they genuinely didn't know how to relate to someone in reciept of a spot of bad news. At social events, such as at a director's birthday party, my wife and I were ostracised. Nobody wanted to spend time with us lest we infect them with our 'inevitable' downer vibes... That really sucked.
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People are frequently incompetent at handling stuff like this, either for fear of stuff like "how you doing? Oops...that MS thing...uhhh" or fear of facing their own emotions, which, lets face it, is extremly common in most walks of life.
Perhaps there is a degree of prejudice too, being "normal" is something most people expect and to not be "normal" is something many move away from instinctivly.
So much for humans being smarter than animals eh?
I'm happy to say that in my life almost everyone I know or have known could handle speaking to someone like yourself with MS, learning more by being brave enough to ask questions can also be a great support tool, they truly empathise and understand, makes you feel still human!
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