Results and then what?

So we survived the honeymoon and had pretty much come to terms with the fact that I very probably had MS and had undergone the arduous tests in order to convince the NHS to pay for the beta interferon my consultant neurologist (an excellent man called Dr Nisbet who's private practice is based in Hove) and popular opinion all said I needed to be on, ASAP.

I went back to work for a few days and then, after work one evening, got an appointment to see Nisbet and get the results conclusively. My wife and I had decided to go together; while I instincively prefer getting bad news on my own so that I control how other people find out, we had decided that she *should* be with me and honestly I feel it directly contributed to my understanding that we are in this together. Just don't tell her as I'll never live it down!

Anyway... boom! Its MS. But its mild relapsing-remitting which has a 60% chance of becoming secondary progressive within some arbitrary 5-10 year timeframe. Beta interferon (and, perversely, maybe cannabis) can delay that progressions so the Consultant would apply to the NHS's Primary Care Trust for funding for it ASAP and it would take about a month to come through.

So then its the tricky bit. Getting on with the rest of your life. MS isn't a disease that will kill you (unless you are *exceptionally* unlucky even among those unlucky enough to get a 1:185,000 condition!) so curling up on the floor and waiting to die isn't an option. Doing nothing and ending up an invalid living in squalor with a pittance of money from the state is an option but its one to be avoided. And so my mind started making me think about how I'd adapt to a situation where I couldn't always continue to work in a job that required reading intensively. The whole thing became an intellectual challenge, something to be worked through and around, not a horror to be subjected to. That's why I think I managed to stay comparitively sane (admittedly I was starting from a fairly sketchy baseline!) and sanguine throughout the aftermath of being diagnosed.

What I found far, far harder to deal with was watching the news of my condition impacting on the faces of people I loved. My wife took it hard, my parents were crestfallen and mildly self-recriminatory although the disease has no apparent hereditry component, and all this was horrible to be the central cause of! In the end, I think, people have got to grips with it. Although sometimes I'll catch my wife a bit tearful and evasive as to exactly why. I don't really care about me having MS - I care about a disease that does *that* to the woman I love.