Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

After going to the doctor the first time, and freaking out, and waiting an hour because my doctor never has her shit together (I thought I always ran late) I'm told I need an MRI.
This scares the shit out of me for two reasons:
1.) The fear that something might seriously be wrong with me.
2.) The only thing I know about MRIs is that Dr. House likes to do them a lot, and my mind immediately flashes to that one episode where LL Cool J has all his prison tattoos sucked out of his skin. Being a heavily tattooed individual, I'm convinced this is exactly what is going to happen to me. And no, in case you were wondering, none of my tattoos were obtained in prison.

I take my referral and go to Community Radiology, they give me a form and I check "no" to two pages of things like, "have you ever had an injury to your eye involving metal?" or "do you have an aneurysm clip?"
They send me to the back, and I take off my clothes and go through the tedious procedure of removing all of my body piercings. They have me waiting in a little room but I'm able to briefly peep inside the MRI room. It kinda reminds me of this:

"The Pipe"

To my suprise, it's not so bad. I'm not claustrophobic, and I don't get all my tattoos sucked out, and besides being incredibly noisy it kind of reminds me of the beds on the plane when they're on the way to Fhloston Paradise in The Fifth Element. I fell asleep almost immediately. Trippy dreams ensued. In fact at one point I think they even had to wake me up because I moved or some shit. While it's kind of disappointing that this is going to be a part of the rest of my life, I'm okay with taking a nap in a tube once in awhile. 

Uncomfortably Numb.

I guess my whole story starts sometime earlier this year. The very first things I noticed were that I could sleep for 12 hours and still feel exhausted, and that I was forgetting where I put things and having serious problems with short term memory. I chalked it up to the fact that I am ADD and a bit of a stoner, talked briefly about going back to a psychiatrist and being prescribed Adderall, then forgot about it.

April 2, 2011--  I'm at work like I normally am on a Sunday. I'm an apprentice hairstylist and Sundays are my favorite day because I get to take walk-ins. I'm nearing the end of my day, when I start to notice that my feet feel like they're asleep. Unlike many of my coworkers, I don't wear Gaga heels, I wear super breathable, super comfy canvas sneakers. I'm the color room jogging in place for a few minutes, waiting for that tingly pins and needles sensation that comes with the rush of blood back to a numb extremity. I' m afraid that my smoking and bad eating have caught up with me and I am having some sort of blood vessel constriction. I go home and obsessively massage my feet, try to relax, and decide to wait it out till the morning.
April 3, 2001: I wake up at 7am exactly, like I do every morning (this is apparently common in MS patients, I never did this until recent years). This time, I don't go back to bed, because it feels like someone shot me up with Novocaine from the waist down. I panic. I get out of bed and breathe a small sigh of relief when I discover that I don't seem to have any problems walking. I wonder if my delightfully squishy memory foam mattress has set my back out of alignment and I've pinched some important nerve. I open up the computer to Google. Every doctor I've ever had has told me to avoid self-diagnosing on WebMD, and while I don't need to get myself any more worked up, I need something to explain what's causing my body to go numb. The very first answer to pop up is MS. I write it off, after all I am 22, and I have no family history of MS. The only people I've encountered with MS that I was aware of were physically disabled and at times horribly depressing, and I'm neither. My search, however, is popping up with other scary things too-- nasty viruses, stroke, Lyme disease, etc. I drink too many energy drinks to ever have a vitamin B12 deficiency, and at this point I am begging fate to do me a solid and let it be a small injury, I'd even take a thyroid problem.
By now it's 11am. My boyfriend wakes up and finds me in the shower, panicking, scrubbing furiously at my skin to try and awaken any sort of sensation. My efforts have done nothing except make my skin ridiculously pink. At this point I'm so confused and terrified that all I can do is ball up in the fetal position and sob, probably scaring the hell out of my boyfriend because up until that point I don't think I'd cried a tear in front of  him. He calms me down, and tells me I need to call my doctor. I agree, and the story continues.

A Chacun Son Histoire.

Two years ago I received a moleskine notebook as a gift from a family friend overseas. The cover reads, in French, "Each person has a story."
I used the notebook to write down recipes, grocery lists, quotations, new French phrases I picked up, a eulogy for my grandfather. But never a story. I never really felt like I had one to tell, save for several silly vignettes about my sweet life in Philadelphia when I was in college, or that awesome time when 8 people and a bottle of rum evaded the police.
Fast forward two years and I am newly diagnosed with MS. Ol' Wikipedia has lots of fun things to say about it, including :


-broad spectrum of signs and symptoms
-the cause remains unknown
-often progresses to physical and cognitive disability.
-permanent neurological problems often occur
-There is no known cure
-MS medications can have adverse effects or be poorly tolerated
-Life expectancy of patients is 5 to 10 years lower than that of the unaffected population. 


And that's just in the first paragraph. So naturally, upon reading that, I'm freaking out, thinking I'm going to become crazy and crippled, and die 5-10 years earlier than I'm supposed to (My lifestyle already makes my chances of living to be 100 incredibly slim). It was bucket list time, and I decided to start this blog. 
I still don't know the direction this is going to go. I want to connect with other people going through the same thing, or help the people that aren't understand it just a little bit better. I don't even just want to talk about MS, because my life is still awesome albeit changed forever by this super inconvenient diagnosis. We'll see what happens.