Diagnosed in August 24

As the title says, I was diagnosed with ppms back in August. After a visit to the doctor, who was more interested in that I am over 40 and not been to a GP for 8 years. Saw a different doctor who thought it was a compressed spinal cord. Off for my first MRI, passed to the neurologist, who dropped the bombshell of MS. Two more MRIs, and my MS isn’t active. I’m quite lucky as I can still do everyday tasks, work and drive.
Still haven’t accepted it, don’t think I ever will.

1 Like

Hi macca,

I would recommend counselling through the MS Society.

I was a bit sceptical of it but it helped me lots.

I just go in and do my thinking out loud. It helps me to get my thoughts in order.

Welcome to the party :smiley:

EH

I think that about two or three years after I was diagnosed the only way I could get my head around what was happening was to say to myself that I only had MS when I was having a relapse of some sort. I only had one or two a year and they were relatively trivial on the whole, so in my mind it made perfect sense. It was about 10 years after diagnosis when I started to get relapses that were more significant, and then my mantra was that “if this is as bad as it gets then I’m fine”.

Because it is such a crazy disease, there’s no prognosis that you could use to prepare yourself for anything, and then you’ve got absolutely no idea how disabled you could possibly become, so really I think you deal with it in whatever way works for you.

I know you say you never will accept it, but my experience has been that I can only accept what I’ve got right now. I’m not sure it’s possible to do more than that really, because you’re asking yourself to accept thousands of different potential futures.

I also remember a friend telling me that he was diagnosed when he was in his 20s and barely anything had changed healthwise for him in the next 25 years.

When my symptoms started to get a lot worse, around the time I was forced to retire, I did classes in something called “acceptance and commitment therapy” which was one night a week for six weeks or so. I didn’t get anything out of it and thought it was a really bizarre psychological therapy. Even at the time I would come out of the class shaking my head wondering whether I’d been in an alternative universe for two hours. At the end of the course I felt maybe I must have a serious problem for not being able to accept my condition, it took me awhile to realise that I had accepted having ms within a couple of hours of being diagnosed, and that what I was having the problem accepting was the specific symptoms that were causing the problems in work.

I wasn’t expecting to ramble on quite that much! In essence I’m basically saying there’s different ways of doing accepting, so I wouldn’t worry about not accepting the overall enormous big picture.

Take care

1 Like

A lot of people with MS, including myself, do say that they go through something like a period of ‘grieving’ after diagnosis. Grieving for a lost future, hope and dreams - or something like that. It does take time for life with MS and the uncertainty it brings to become the ‘new norm’.

1 Like