This is a post I wrote before my diagnosis in early 2019, when I was in the midst of tests and uncertainty. One of my recurring experiences was people telling me that I would be okay and not to worry. This felt incredibly dismissive and diminished my experience. After thinking on this I decided to …
Getting a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis is a hard pill to swallow. The future can feel more uncertain than it did before and you can get caught thinking about all the “what if’s“. One of the biggest fears I’ve had to deal with is that of being a burden and feeling alone in my journey. …
It’s been a year since my official diagnosis of MS, though it is likely I was living with it for longer than that, unnoticed. I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the previous year and cement my moves going forward.
“I have multiple sclerosis, because I thought why stop at one?” Tim Ferguson If you’re anything like me when MS was mentioned as a possible explanation for my symptoms, I was searching my brain to remember what that stood for. None of the doctors or technicians during the investigation stage elaborated on what MS was, …
Researchers in Austria published a small study in December 2019 showing potentially protective effects of learning a second language on the decline of grey matter in the brain, a common indicator of MS.
In September 2018 I had my first baby, a little boy we named Maximus. I immediately fell in love and all the things I had worried about before he was born vanished. Everything felt so right and so easy. I experienced the expected things like postpartum depression and terrible troubles with breastfeeding but despite the …
Unfortunately, multiple sclerosis is often misattributed to other conditions when symptoms first appear as it shares so many characteristics of other often benign conditions. My MS was almost missed when my first relapse was diagnosed as vertigo. If I hadn’t pushed to keep investigating my symptoms, I would have seen a physiotherapist to treat vertigo …
A few people told me I was brave going overseas alone to Mongolia earlier this year. When I mentioned my plan to go to Vanuatu with my one-year old solo they thought I had gone a bit crazy. Turns out it was a bit of a crazy idea, but it was also an incredibly insightful …
When I first told people I was planning on travelling to Mongolia I was met with a lot of shock and disbelief. I was brave to travel there alone, apparently it was an unusual location for me to choose and not many people had wanted to travel there. For me, it was a given, it …
It’s been a few months now since I visited China and I’ve been a bit slow in getting my thoughts down. I will start by saying that China isn’t on my “visit again” list. At least not any time soon. It’s not that I hated my experience or anything to that level, but it wasn’t …