Under the radar

When I reached the age of thirty, I was helping my father-in-law do some gardening when I bent over to pick up a leaf and I felt a twang somewhere in my lumbar region. This twang put me completely out-of-action for a week or so afterwards. My GP had simply smiled and said, “welcome to

Fampridine trial thoughts

I’ve just come off my trial period of Fampridine and I’ve decided to carry on with it. Fampridine is a potassium channel blocker which ultimately means that messages can travel along nerves more efficiently. It’s prescribed for MS patients like me, with a walking disability. It’s something I would take alongside the other medications I’m

Postcard from Osteoporopolis

Warning: Tired travel analogies may continue to be employed in this post. “I know the C word and the F word. The C word is cor blimey, and the F word is flippin’ ‘eck” – Rat, lead singer of Chesterfield based punk band The Bland on stage at the Take Two club, Attercliffe c.1988 It’s

A postcard from Limboland

A month ago, if you asked me how tall I was, I’d say I was a six footer. It seems I’m not. I’m a five-foot-ten-and-a-half short-arse apparently, so essentially I’ve lost an inch and a half (4cm) in height. Even if you consider I may have always rounded up by half an inch, and I

The aftermath

Warning: this post contains experience of intense pain and some details of sensitive medical procedures. Sometimes I think of my MS as a monster. A monster who is always there tugging at my neck, poking me in the back, tripping me up or holding my ankles like a deadweight. As a child of the ‘70s,

Blitzkrieg post-script

Well, everything was a bit miserable at the end of my last post so apologies for that. I’m a week or two further along the line now and I’ve been applying the patches to their designated places in the literature and experimenting with each zone. I’ve found that the only place that works is my

Blitzkrieg

One of the things my brand new neurologist did for me when I met him earlier this year is confirm my diagnosis of restless legs syndrome (RLS). It’s something that I’ve been wondering about, on and off, pretty much since diagnosis, so it’s ‘nice’ to have it confirmed. It’s not a symptom of MS, but

Carbon brainprint

I’m quite happy with the fact that, as a family of four (six if you include Fluffles and Fudge our guinea pigs), we’re pretty good at recycling. Our youngest even has the job title of Recycling Officer to encourage her to weed out things that could be added to our recyclable waste. On top of

Copaxone changes

Thanks to a comment from HoneysuckleB on a recent post, I rang my MS nursing team at big-city hospital to find out if I could switch from the daily Copaxone injections to the three-times-a-week version. The reasoning behind this is a fairly straightforward one: rather pathetically, I’m dependent on my Outlook calendar at work to

The sting

Well, I’ve been taking Copaxone (Glatiramer Acetate) for about a week now. I administered my first injection under the gaze of my wonderful MS nurse last Monday. When I was on Rebif I didn’t really inject into my arm or leg, favouring the fattier parts of my anatomy. It has been my arse and my