An Unwelcome Visitor: Chapter 6..........It's all out there, seek and ye shall find!

                  After I had been back back at work for the best part of a year and a half,  I had settled into a good position at work, I had been attached to Company security all this time, people assumed I was now a permanent fixture within that team but things were about to change for me!  During this time I had made regular visits to my local hospital and had countless hours of physio to 'correct' my battered posture, of which I was completely to blame!  Due to me leaning to the left and heavily on my stick, due to me sitting in such a way/position in the armchair or in the car, as long as my head was in an upright position and I did not feel nauseous, I was happy but my spine, neck and pelvis had other ideas!  My whole 'frame' was totally out of sync with my brain and I was severely 'lop-sided', so a plan of attack was definitely needed to sort things out.  I had to do a lot of pelvic exercises, lying, sitting and standing, then I had to do all manner of balance techniques, standing on one leg, eyes closed then turn to the left, then the right and promptly fall over and start again!!  One exercise that I particularly hated meant lying on my back, then roll to the left, back to the centre, then roll to the right, back to the centre then sit up!  This would make me feel so dizzy and would always end up in making me feel as sick as a dog and although I tried my best,  I just could not do them, so other forms of exercises were worked out for me!  One I did had me and the physio's in hysterics and this particular one was more like a dance!  It meant I had to move sideways using the balance bars as support and cross my left leg over my right until I had come to the end of the bars, then using the opposite leg to start, move back to the beginning again!  This was a very similar move to that of Hank Marvin & The Shadows or more latterly the group MUD and what made it even funnier was that my Physio at the time, a lovely girl, had never heard of either of them, WHAT!!!  I just ended up saying that she was young and you had to be there,  ask your mum and dad!
                 One day I was asked if I had ever had acupuncture before, which I hadn't and so it was decided to give it a try and see if it would help with the pain in my neck and shoulders!  I had to answer all of these questions first, have a little talk about the 'possible' benefits,  see if I was happy about it first, I had no problem and was just glad to try anything if it could help me to get back to any form of 'normality'. My first session came and I arrived at one of the physio areas, the physio introduced herself as Fran,  all of the physio's I have ever had have all been lovely people and she was no exception.  These are the pins that we shall use she told me, we shall put them here and here and here and here and here,  oh and there and there!  Christ how many are you going to use, I remember saying and it's in my neck not my whole body!!  At that time I was unaware that certain parts of the body are connected to parts that seem to be miles away!  Ok, do your worst I said to her and  battle commenced!  You may feel a little scratch she said, no love, you mean prick I replied, we both had a snigger and the ice was broken, the pins were all put in, I was left, on my side to read my book and was told to relax and she would return in a while!  Upon her return,  the pins were removed, I was given a brief pep talk on possible after effects and an appointment was made for the following week. As per bloody usual, I was hoping for that elusive 'quick fix' and as always, it was not to be!  I met her the following week and she asked me how i felt and I said no different, so we tried one more session to see if I would start to notice any change.  Anyway, it was not to be, so it was back to the drawing board, I thanked Fran for persevering with me, actually I said she was probably a man-hater who just loved to stab men with needles and was probably into voodoo, fortunately she laughed, or was it the cackle of a She-Devil?
             More physio ensued and eventually it started to work for me, a lot of work from us both, a lot of frustration on my part, all of this was so incredibly tiring but I was determined to regain at least some of what I had lost!  God bless them, they were so patient with me but they made me work, the phrases, keep going and just a bit further, you can do it, all gave me the motivation to reach the 'G' word! The 'G' word of course being 'goal' or 'goals', now as I have said on many occasions, I hate that word,  I mean 'fucking' hate that word, it won't ever give me back what I want, so I can't acknowledge it, just a personal thing you understand! 
                  It was about this time, about seven years ago that I started to take Amantadine to help me deal with my fatigue levels!  This helped me a great deal because fatigue had become such a problem to me, the thing I liked about this drug was that even I could see it working and it certainly helped me to deal with fatigue. I carried on taking it right up until last year, more of that to come later in future blogs.
                  I was incredibly lucky I suppose, I managed to be able to keep my MS symptoms under control, being well aware of my limitations and working with it so to speak. This I was able to do right up until April of 2008 and then I suffered my first bad relapse.  I suppose, in hindsight, I had been aware of certain 'warning signs' for some months beforehand!  Work was now going well and I now was working within the main Stores of the Company that I am with, this in itself was an achievement for me, as this was a position that I had applied for, sat an interview and managed to get the job on my own merit,  not just be given the job to give me something to do, this made me feel really good about myself and my confidence was doing really well.  All of a sudden, I seemed to be getting hit with fatigue more and more often, my left leg started to ache a lot and my left foot seemed to be permanently cold to the touch.  Then I stumbled in the garden and really bashed my right foot on low level brick wall, this was entirely my own  fault, I just reached across to pick up a spade and lost my footing, tried to correct myself but fell against the wall!  Then one morning when my alarm went off, I just did not get out of bed straight away,  I just laid there thinking to myself, Christ I feel like shit!!  I finally managed to get out of bed,  lost my balance almost immediately and just fell back onto the  bed,  I remember thinking at the time, what the hell is going on, why do I feel so bad!  My wife rang in work and said I was not coming in for a couple of days and that we would be seeing my Doctor.  When I saw him, he had no hesitation in signing me off work for a couple of weeks, I was lucky, he had been my Doctor right from the early days of my diagnosis in 2000 and I am pretty sure that he thought that I was having  a relapse! Anyway two weeks became a month, which became six weeks and eventually I was laid up for almost a year.  Things were slightly different this time around, I was not so scared, certainly not as I was all those years ago, I kind of new what to do, how to do it and when to do it, life was still really hard for us but unlike the first time,  I was able to do most things myself.  So more physio, a session of steroid infusions, more waiting, hoping and praying, I was allowed to increase the dose of Amantadine and this started to help with my fatigue. We did lots of walking, short journeys to start, then we would go further if I felt up to it, little and often and unlike before, we made sure that my body and my mind were kept as active as possible!
                     During this time,  one of my oldest and dearest friends, Rik, would come and take me to the local Cine-World, always on 'cheap Tuesday' naturally!  We would sit through some great movies, some ok ones and also some of the shittiest films you could imagine!  We would just take it in turns in picking a film, go to the cinema, load up with sweets and choose any seat we liked most times because we went in the afternoons, there was never a problem in getting one!  If the film was a good one,  we would come out buzzing, just like a pair of kids but if the film was a stinker, quite often the pair of us old farts would nod off, and on a couple of occasions we would be woken up by staff!  They would never give us a refund for a bad film either, can't think why, bastards! I really started to look forward to our weekly visits to the movies, it was great for me to get out and take my mind off of things for a couple of hours.
                     As I said earlier, this second relapse took me out of the game for almost another year and when I was able to return to work,  I did no what to expect and I was able to have a totally different mindset to the on I had the first time around. Everything was done gradually and as before, I was strictly monitored, I have nothing but total gratitude to my Company, they were supportive to me and my family whilst I was off sick and they were so good to me upon my return.  It was about the time of my return that the 'suggestion' was made to me about counselling but at that time in my life, I was incredibly cynical and thought that I knew best!  You see, I still had a massive problem to overcome,  I was still unable to accept my diagnosis and so because of this, I was a very angry and bitter person! This was not necessarily apparent on the 'outside' but most definitely on  the 'inside'.  Basically, I had to start accepting my lot, let go of the old and move on with the new and at that time, I suppose I was still very much in denial!  
                 The next chapter will discuss how I finally decided that I would go and have councelling, it's profound affect on me and how it enabled me to look deeper into the world of MS that for too long I had avoided!