Reclusiveness

I have mentioned reclusiveness and MS a couple of times in previous entries. I have put off writing this but I suppose that I better just get it over with and explain myself. I wouldn't be at all upset if you just stopped reading this entry here and now, in fact, I'd prefer it if you did.

* I realised that I had MS in 2003 after reading an article in the Observer magazine by a newly diagnosed journalist. She felt very sorry for herself but, after the shock, I wasn't too bothered.

* I was officially diagnosed a year later.

* I was convinced, right up until 2006 when I could barely walk a step, that I'd beat it through an incredibly restrictive diet called The Best Bet Diet.

* I was treated for MS related CCSVI, a new and controversial treatment, in Alexandria, Egypt in December 2010. It helped me enormously and lots of symptoms disappeared. Today I can't use my legs much, but apart from that there aren't many things wrong. Sitting opposite me at a table, you'd never guess that I was ill. It feels like the CCSVI treatment has stopped any activity of the illness and this spring was the first for seven years where I have not had a seasonal MS relapse. I don't expect to get any worse any more. I went to Dr Tariq in Alexandria, although I could have chosen to travel to Brussels, Frankfurt or Glasgow, because he is innovative and seems the best choice of practitioners. My brother Adrian, my father Brian and Consuelo, who very kindly took time off from her school in Spain, accompanied me and we had a lovely time. I have never met a nicer people than the Egyptian people, everybody was exceptionally good natured and kind.

* I became a recluse because I was prescribed a pill called Tizanidine. The dose was titrated up for three months so I didn't think it to blame for the awful side effects. I put the psychosis that I suffered down to my being better informed about my illness. I began to take it on Adelaide's birthday in the summer of 2009 and began to lose my mind in winter. I decided that, being now realistically aware of the unlikelihood of a cure (whereas I had always been very optimistic in the past) resulted in an understandable depression and frustration. I would regularly complain of a sensation of having been buried alive, I became agoraphobic, I would obsess over the things that I could no longer do as a consequence of my illness and I would list the things in life that I considered to 'be nothing' which was an endless list. I really had lost my mind. Consuelo thought that it must be a symptom of the MS. She tried so hard to be cheerful and to help me but, after six months of dark gloom she just couldn't take it any more. It had all made her depressed, and, understandably, she escaped back to Spain. It did give me some great, intricate, fascinating hallucinations, as I lay in bed at night though. Another side effect was terrible, although infrequent, eye pains. In April this year, just in case although I thought it unlikely, I stopped taking the pills in order to see whether it would affect the eye problem.

The next day a miraculous change occurred within me and I realised that I was balanced and cheerful again. I can leave the house, I am always happy and I don't care about any illness.