have put you through trillions of tests and yet they don't find anything wrong with you. Until the day that they finally gave you a name for your illness- Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Curiosity takes you to find more about this disease. You want to find a reason but the more you read the more you get scare. Suddenly you find yourself with the thought: Why me? That question will be forever in our mind, specially in those days that even the simple things are hard to do. Nobody can give us the answer to why. They can't even tell us what has caused it. They can explain to us that it is an autoimmune disease, that it affects our nervous system, that it can progress or not and some theories of how it how not it could have started. NO, it is not a punishment for something that we did wrong, or a punishment to our family. You should not feel guilt. We are good people and we have lived the best we can. It just is..... The most difficult thing to do in this disease, like any other chronic disease, is to accept that we have it. Specially when to the rest of the world it is synonym of disability. But I am not defined by my disease, I am not MS. I am a person with necessities and dreams that happens to have MS. Most probable you have passed through a mourning period. Mourning for the lost of your way of life, for the things that you won't be able to do or the limitations you will have to face. In my case it was not to be able to work in the profession that I have loved so much. But this period like any other must finish accepting the disease but it should never be done with resignation. Resignation is synonym of defeat. To accept the disease does not mean that we gave up. On the contrary it makes it easier to learn to live with it because then we don't waste energy denying its existence. To accept the disease means that we accept the necessity to make change in our lives. Such changes can included: our lifestyle, our daily routines, our house or our work. This is something that we cannot avoid if we want to remain useful to ourself, our family and society. You are in charge, even when it doesn't seem like it. What you do of your life depend of you and not of the MS. |
Why me? Coming to terms with the disease
Maria A Reyes-Velarde, MD, MPH hablemosdeem.com |
This work by Maria Adelita Reyes-Velarde, MD, MPH is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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