The Problem with Progression, Revisited

English: Cropped version of :Image:Domino effect.jpg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The good folks who administer the website MultipleSclerosis.net (click here) and I have reached an agreement to publish 20 essays from the Wheelchair Kamikaze archives on their site. MS.net is a wonderful resource for MS patients and those who love them, filled with the latest MS news as well as insightful articles and essays by folks dealing with the disease in all its forms. Lots of good stuff there, all of it high-quality. Best as I can figure, the fact that they decided to include some of my essays must be due to some sort of clerical error.

The initial WK essay published on MultipleSclerosis.net is a post that first appeared on this blog in July, 2009, entitled “The Problem with Progression” (click here). Back then I’d only been writing Wheelchair Kamikaze for about six months, and had been in a wheelchair for one full year. At the risk of stating the obvious, the essay deals with the progressive nature of Multiple Sclerosis disability. In it, I state that “the problem with progressive neurologic diseases is that they progress”, a sentiment which may seem self-evident but carries quite a wallop. When I was first diagnosed I listened in a befuddled haze as the doctor talked about the need to try to minimize something he kept referring to as disease progression. I’d no idea what he was talking about, but I sure would find out in the months and years to come.

Even in those early days it was clear I had progressive neurologic disease, with few if any viable treatment options available. Since then, new disease modifying therapies and even some alternative approaches have proven to have significant positive impact on many afflicted with the relapsing remitting form of MS, but though the attention of researchers is finally shifting to progressive disease there remains precious little in the way of effective therapies for us “progressives”.

The roughly 6 years between my initial diagnosis and my writing “The Problem with Progression” had seen the disease wreak havoc with my life. I’d gone from having a slight intermittent limp to requiring first an ankle brace, then a cane, and finally an electric wheelchair. I’d been busily employed in a high profile industry but was now 2 ½ years into my forced retirement, had seen my social life diminish from flame to flicker, had witnessed my body betray me in ways I’d never thought possible. Such a tremendous amount of upheaval in such a relatively short amount of time, my body caught tight in the grip of a seemingly insatiable beast, my mind buffeted by an emotional whirlwind, my intellect left to desperately try to sort it all out.

Given the alarming rapidity of my disease progression, I wrote about the difficulty of processing the losses already visited when the prospect of losses to come loomed ominously on the horizon. The flipside of looking back to mourn the wounds already inflicted is looking forward and anticipating the insults yet wrought, leaving little room in which to find some measure of solace.

The opening paragraph of “The Problem with Progression” talks about the realization that I’d very likely soon need to use my wheelchair inside my apartment, when at the time the mechanical monster had been used exclusively out-of-doors. Well, that little prediction did indeed soon come to pass, and now the notion of my walking from the bedroom to the living room seems about as likely as my being elected Pope (quite the long shot for a Jewish guy from Queens).

Later in the essay I talked about how annual events had become markers of my disease progression, times when I could look back one year and assess the damage done over the previous 12 months. I used the example of the Super Bowl, wondering if and when I’d no longer be able to watch it from the comfort of my living room couch, or even be able to manipulate the TV remote. It’s now been at least four Super Bowls since I’ve watched the NFL championship game – or anything else, for that matter – from that couch. Instead, all of my TV viewing these last few years has been done from the vantage point of my wheelchair, which is at once both a constant reminder of my imprisonment by the demented captor that is MS, and the key that keeps me from being completely swallowed up by the dungeon of disease.

The six years that preceded my writing “The Problem with Progression” witnessed MS completely reshape my existence in dramatic fashion. The five years since, though, have seen the changes become much more incremental, but in some ways perhaps even more insidious. The psychological hurdles presented by being forced by the disease to totally change almost every aspect of my day-to-day existence in the half-dozen years following my initial diagnosis were big-ticket items, readily identifiable monoliths with which to emotionally grapple.

Now, although the disease continues to progress largely unabated, the changes are more discrete, much less apparent to anyone but me and my closest observers – increasingly clumsy fine motor skills in my one still usable hand, a sometimes crushing fatigue, muscle spasms that pound away in the dead of night. Most of the blatantly obvious milestones have already been reached, but each passing year finds me still weaker and less able. Creative adaptations allow for a semblance of equilibrium in quality of life, but at some point, barring some much hoped for intervention, the mounting deficits will defy adaptation. The difference between the earlier, more obvious stages of my disease progression and that of these later years is kind of like being dragged under water. Once your head goes under the surface, all anybody looking from above sees is that you’ve submerged. The only one who can feel the increasing pressure and mounting darkness of being dragged deeper and deeper into the murky depths is you, the marvels of fresh air and sunlight drifting off as if they were only half remembered fragments of a long-ago dream.

It’s testament to the power of the human spirit that life beneath the waves still holds elements of wonder, sparks that continue to shine brightly once the effort is made to clear away the shade. Though the disease progresses so too does the desire to defy it, to stake a claim in a world turned upside down. I may not get out and about as much as I used to, even in the wheelchair, and the rigors and stresses of the disease – both physical and mental – may dictate submission to constraints I long to throw off, but I’m still here, dammit, occasionally licking my wounds but nowhere near willing to raise the white flag. Dragged under the sea of disability I seem to have managed to grow gills, and though I acknowledge and accept that there are depths below which there can be no survival I maintain hope that somehow, someway, I’ll break the grip of MS and once again bob to the surface. In the meantime I’ll simply do the best I can, even if this year’s best pales in comparison to that of only a few years ago. The problem with progression may indeed prove to be unsolvable, but it won’t be for lack of trying.