Back after a long break.
Ive had this rubbish thing for 16 years. A constant battle of alternating between positive and negative.
How do you kind folk deal with ìt?
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Hi Andrew. If you mean how to deal with positive and negative emotions and thoughts about MS and the future. That’s a big question! I’ve been taking low dose Citalopram for years - pretty much since I was diagnosed 18-19 years ago. I find meditation/ mindfulness helps keep my mind and emotions generally calm and settled. Being retired and older (71) helps
Welcome back!
I don’t think I do deal with it to be honest, I think I’m just resigned to it. I’m physically screwed by MS, but my cognition and speech so far are doing okay. I have no idea how I will cope if either of those two things start to get affected badly, and if I try to think about it it terrifies me -so I don’t. Up to the point that I had to get an electric wheelchair to be able to get around in the house I used to say to myself that if this is as bad as it gets then I’m okay. I don’t say that anymore. I have no control now over what happens to me, I remember saying to one of my closest friends years ago that once I was no longer able to feed myself I wanted to be able to end my life, but by the time that happened I realised that I’m no longer even able to get the bloody tablets out of the packet so there’s no way out. I think I mostly try to live in the present, because I suspect the future is so bleak there’s no point thinking about it. There’s no point wasting my time catastrophising or worrying about it, there’s nothing I can achieve by doing that. I think having a dog helps, because dogs just exist. I don’t get the sense that mine spends any time caring about the past or the future, except for understanding the present when experience tells him I will shout if he rips that toilet tissue up again or that the carers are due to arrive in about half an hour and that means he’s going to get food. I am very dependent on routine to structure my day, week, month and so on, and I think that the predictability and certainty of that is something I can control and so I really really do control it because that’s all I’ve got.
I think that’s why I like coming onto the forums as well, it’s something I do when I’m in bed just before turning everything off, and answering questions and offering my experiences give me a sense of feeling useful. Thinking about it I suppose my expectations of life have got much less, and so the extremes of positive and negative are not so broad. So I can be a little bit more positive or a little bit more negative but ultimately neither state unbalances me by much. Crikey that sounds a bit miserable! I do okay though.
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