New Year's Eve Through MS Eyes (repost)

(This essay was first posted about one year ago. Guess this makes it a golden not so oldie, but it's timely and the sentiments expressed will hold true as long as MS remains my unwanted life partner…)

Back in in the days before I got jumped by MS I always loved New Year’s Eve. While many of my fellow habitual night crawlers derided the night’s festivities as “amateur’s hour”, a time when those less accustomed to nocturnal hijinks were apt to get sloppy and make fools of themselves, I embraced the ringing in of the new year con mucho gusto. Never content with just one party for the duration of the night, my friends and I would go on a kind of New Year’s Eve tour, hitting four or five shindigs and nightclubs before heading home well after dawn on January 1. The sentimentality of the holiday, with its tacit promises of sins forgiven and futures bright with hope held me in its thrall, for though I seemed to live in a state of perpetual neurotic dissatisfaction, I also brimmed with expectations that bigger and brighter days were waiting just over the horizon. New Year’s Eve was the one night a year that this heady brew of emotions and expectations were codified into celebration, to be shared with friends and strangers alike.

I suppose my fondness for the holiday has its roots in my early childhood. My mom and dad divorced when I was three, and for several years after the split my mom and I lived with my grandmother and my unmarried aunt. On New Year’s Eve my young, single mom – who herself loved the nightlife – would head out with her friends into the NYC of the swinging 60s, and my grandmother, aunt, and I would watch Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians playing old timey big band hits for the well-heeled crowd at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, broadcast live to our ragged black and white console TV. We didn’t have much money and lived in a building in the Bronx that was closer to a tenement than a high-rise, but our lack of means did nothing to diminish the excitement and expectations of the evening.

Though I was maybe only four or five years old, on New Year’s Eve I was allowed to stay up till midnight to take part in a family tradition that stretched back decades. We didn’t have any fancy noisemakers or horns, but at the stroke of midnight, as confetti and balloons floated down on the well to do at the Waldorf and Guy Lombardo’s boys played “Auld Lang Syne”, my grandmother, aunt, and I grabbed sturdy but well-worn metal pots and pans, and, using big spoons as drumsticks, burst into the hallway of our apartment building, banging with joyous intensity on those old, scarred cooking implements, creating a raucous racket and shouting at the top of our lungs “Happy New Year’s!” Most of the other residents of the building joined us in creating a jubilant and low rent but somehow defiant cacophony, delirious and intoxicating stuff for the very young me. I daresay that for those few moments we had a lot more fun than the swells at the Waldorf.

When I grew older, as a young adult I fully embraced the revelry of the holiday. I had quite a few memorable New Year’s Eves in my late teens through my mid 20s, from seeing the new wave band The Waitresses playing a show at 5 AM at the famous Peppermint Lounge to bumming cigarettes from a then barely known Howie Mandel at an MTV “after party” that rollicked on and on as if it might never end. I recall with great fondness stumbling out of a nightclub with a group of deliriously intoxicated friends and madly howling at the moon as the last seconds ticked away on one long ago year. As I transitioned into full adulthood, mixed in with raucous annual celebrations were the occasional intimate, more romantic New Year’s get-togethers with lovers and close friends. No matter the circumstances, though, the night never passed without champagne and good cheer, and always kindled within me expectations of bigger and better things to come.

Now, nearly 13 years since I was diagnosed with Primary Progressive MS, the night carries with it a much more complex and troublesome mix of emotions. For the first several years after my creeping paralysis struck, while I was still relatively able bodied, my wife and I would host New Year’s Eve parties, more sedate than my revelries of the past but good times nonetheless. Now, with my body increasingly compromised and my stamina waning, even a small gathering of friends can prove taxing. This New Year’s it was just my wife and me watching celebrations from around the world beamed into our living room in high definition on our big-screen TV, images so crisp and detailed it seemed as though I could step right into them. That is, if I could step.

Despite my best efforts to stay fixed in the moment, I soon found it impossible to watch millions of people celebrating without enviously contrasting their situation with my own. With nary a thought given to their tremendous good fortune at simply having limbs and senses intact, the televised multitudes danced and sang, drank and strutted, laughed and hugged and mingled and voiced exuberant expectations about a future brimming with possibilities. Lubricated by flowing booze and the magic of the night, all could convince themselves that the coming days held good fortune that would far eclipse those which now belonged to history.

For the healthy masses, New Year’s Eve encapsulates the reality that the future is but a blank canvas, the images to be painted on it not predetermined but subject to the will of each individual. All but the most intransigent of difficulties will give way to effort, ingenuity, and discipline. Reality is but a construct of the human mind and the emotions it creates, and as such can be born anew once the self-defeating habits of the past are no longer allowed to dictate actions in the present. Not that these kinds of changes are easy, but with sound body and mind anything – anything – is possible. Sadly, it took my getting sick for me to fully understand this, but there is no greater truth.

And there I sat in a wheelchair – a wheelchair, goddamnit – trying my best to not begrudge the healthy, to vicariously share in at least some of the delirium, to laugh along with them and not let the sneaky tears that kept making their way to the corners of my eyes expose the turmoil that roiled within. There is indeed a reason they call progressive disease progressive. Physically, this last year has been a rough one, with old symptoms getting noticeably worse and new ones breaking the surface. Activities that could be accomplished with relative ease just a year ago are now at times tortuously difficult, and some of those that had been difficult have become damn near impossible. And by activities I don’t mean anything as devilishly complicated as walking or tying a shoe, but rather firmly gripping a fork, or struggling into a sweater, or on bad days, even just staying out of bed for more than four or five hours at a time. My strange and thus far indecipherable mix of endocrine dysfunctions, creeping paralysis, and hideously painful deteriorating joints (courtesy avascular necrosis, a very rare side effect of the intravenous steroids once used to try to beat back the creeping paralysis) has become more intractable than ever, defying all efforts, mainstream and alternative alike, to slow things down.

Unlike those healthy New Year’s Eve revelers on TV, no amount of willpower or change of habits will arrest this bitter physical decline. I continue to fight my disease on all fronts, employing a dizzying array of supplements and medicines to lessen the impact of some symptoms, and undergoing treatments both holistic and traditional at which my condition seems simply to sneer. Though for the most part my spirit stays strong, in the face of this insidious physical onslaught and its accompanying indignities I find it impossible to not at times give way to the weight of it all, having my breath taken away daily by the shocking realization that this is no dream that I can wake from, but instead a concrete reality in which I am being forced to watch myself slowly wither away. My mantra of “staying in the moment” does still help to keep me grounded, but there are also times when the moment just sucks, no two ways about it. Though I can and do fantasize about a future free from illness, my utter conviction to stare this bastard straight in the eyes lands such fantasies well into the realm of the far-fetched, right there alongside my old dreams of becoming the next Mick Jagger or Philip Roth.

New Year’s Eve is a time to look back and project forward, and for the healthy this shedding of the old and embracing of the new can be cathartic, if even just for a few hours. This New Year’s brought me no such respite, though, as a look back illuminated the losses suffered these past 12 months, and peering too deep into the future can be perilous, a glimpse at the dark at the end of the tunnel, a glance at an unthinkable void.

Yet I am not without hope. I keep myself immersed in the latest research and MS news, and though much of it is, quite frankly, garbage, there are approaches that do show promise. Perhaps I am delusional, but even through this morass of illness and increasing disability my resolve to not back down sometimes bends but doesn’t break, even as I acknowledge that merely stabilizing my disease state is at this point quite a longshot. But I know for a fact that sometimes longshots do come in. After all, I’m a guy who once won $15,000 in the Florida lottery, so I’m proof positive that you’ve got to be in it to win it.

And even as I sat there watching the partiers on TV, wrestling with my complicated and disconcerting mass of emotions, when the clock struck midnight I chugged some champagne and kissed my wife, while my inner five-year-old banged on pots and pans and screamed at the top of his lungs, “Happy New Year’s!”…

MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SUCKS!

Allow me to apologize in advance for the contents of this essay. Quite simply, I’m fed up with Multiple Sclerosis and everything that has to do with Multiple Sclerosis. Those expecting to find any form of eloquence, wisdom, inspiration, or other redeeming qualities in these words will probably be sorely disappointed. Like a bulimic who just polished off a giant platter of lasagna, I’m feeling the need to purge and I have a hunch the results won’t be pretty. What follows promises to be more of a free-form rant than well-constructed discourse. I can’t guarantee any kind of narrative flow or grammatical cohesion, much less literary flourish or clever turn of phrase. No, instead I’m just gonna let it rip, an unadulterated regurgitation of everything about MS that’s been stuck in my craw these last few months. This may not be for the faint of heart, as I just might wander into some very uncomfortable territory. Okay, you’ve been warned; now’s the time to either buckle up or head for the exits.

MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SUCKS!!! I hate this fracking disease. I hate what it’s doing to me, I hate what it’s doing to my MS friends, I hate what it’s doing to those who love or even barely put up with me. I hate the creeping paralysis, I hate the spasticity, I hate the pain, I hate the spasms, and I hate the unrelenting, soul crushing march of constant progression. I hate the slow, systematic dismantling of the life I used to know, I hate the steady erosion of everything I once thought of as “normal”, I hate the constant flow of indignities large and small handed out by the disease. I hate the word “multiple”, and I hate the word “sclerosis”.

I’m sick of being sick, and I’m sick of being sick of being sick. I’m tired of being tired, and I’m tired of being tired of being tired. I’m aghast at the fact that the balance between body parts that work and body parts that don’t work is starting to tip heavily in the favor of “don’t work”, like a sinking ship rearing up as it gets ready to make its fateful plunge. The list of things I can’t do are starting to outnumber the list of things I can do, despite the constant physical and mental adjustments and gyrations that I make trying to contort my life to fit within the ever constricting boundaries imposed by this hellacious disease. I find it impossible to ever get used to having this curse; at least three times a day I find myself shocked at my predicament, barely able to fathom that this is actually my life.

As of this writing I can barely dress myself, can’t cut my own food, can take but one or two hideously painful and treacherous steps. Horrifyingly, these steps are accompanied by a gruesome symphony of crunching and cracking sounds as my hip bones perpetually deteriorate, gut wrenching noises so loud that they can be heard across a large room, all courtesy a tortuously painful degenerative bone condition that has attacked my hips and shoulders that was brought on by IV steroids originally intended to help curb this monster. I'm only able to sleep in one and a half or two-hour spurts because of the intense pain in my hips and shoulders, and on most days I barely have the stamina to spend more than three or four hours at a time out of bed. My right arm is emaciated and most often bent at the elbow due to spasticity, my right leg as weak as a noodle. The left side that I've come so much to depend on is well on its way to failing, the thought of which bores a hole through my very being. And then there are the “bowel and bladder issues” that I share with so many other MSers. Such polite terminology for the fact that we can barely crap and can’t stop peeing. And despite this litany of dysfunction, I know that I’m still one of the lucky ones, as so many with this scourge are in far worse shape than I.

I’m fed up with well-meaning folks uttering some of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard in an attempt to make themselves and me feel better. Upon learning of just why it is that the right side of my body is a shriveled mess and my ass is stuck in a wheelchair, one woman cheerily informed me that her best friend’s husband is completely bedridden due to Progressive Multiple Sclerosis, but that he is just about the happiest person she knows. I just sat there smiling and nodding my head, while on the inside wishing that a rogue chimpanzee would suddenly materialize and eat her face. Her best friend’s bedridden husband is just about the happiest person she knows? A man is likely totally paralyzed, completely incontinent, and probably has to use a feeding tube for nourishment? And this poor soul is just about the happiest person she knows? Who are the rest of her friends, professional mourners? Remind me never to accept an invitation to a dinner party at her place.

I’m angry that the most insidious and destructive form of the disease, Progressive Multiple Sclerosis, the form I suffer from, is kept hidden from public view like a Victorian era mentally deficient child kept locked in an attic. Courtesy the mainstream media and the Multiple Sclerosis Societies, the public never sees the ravaged bodies and mangled lives of people hit hardest by the disease. Instead, the face of MS belongs to celebrities and those patients left mostly unscathed by the illness. There’s even a TV commercial for an MS drug, Tecfidera, that portrays the disease as quite literally something of a carnival. Funny how those celebrities with MS whose disease takes a turn for the worse fall from public view, isn’t it? Where are you, Terry Garr?

Progressive Multiple Sclerosis has made me envious and prone to jealousy, not only of healthy people but even of people with other illnesses. I’ll confess that this even includes people suffering from the relapsing remitting form of the disease, even though I know that RRMS can be its own particular form of hell and can eventually lead to Progressive MS. But just the idea of a remission, a break from the never ending grind of watching myself slowly disappear seems absolutely heavenly. At this point I think I’d give up all the remaining years of my life for just a week of normalcy. Hell, maybe even just an hour. Sixty minutes to go for a walk, to run and jump and dance and button my shirt and tie my shoe and hug my wife and – gasp – drive a car! Yeah, sign me up. That would be one heck of an hour.

Along those same lines, here’s an even more disturbing confession. In ruminating through mental lists of diseases that might be worse than Progressive MS (leprosy, for instance), I sometimes find myself thinking that cancer would be preferable to this creeping paralysis. I know, heresy. But as undeniably horrible as is cancer, at least it’s a disease that ultimately and in relatively short order comes to some sort of conclusion. Yes, I’m fully aware that the disease puts its victims through living hell, and that cancer treatments often seem worse than the disease itself, but at least there are treatments. And at the end of those treatments patients either beat the disease and become survivors who can then begin to reassemble the shards of their life, or they die. Progressive MS doesn’t have the good manners to finish off its victims, instead leaving its least fortunate sufferers consigned to live out their years as fully conscious brains trapped inside prisons of completely useless flesh and bone. The stuff of horror movies, a fate far worse than death as far as I’m concerned. Progressive MS has exorcised me of any fear of death. In fact, given the aforementioned almost unthinkable but quite possible outcome, on many days I’m far more afraid of living than dying.

I'm aware that to many the above words may seem shocking and wrongheaded, but there’s a reason that MS was second only to cancer among the ills suffered by the patients that the infamous Dr. Kevorkian helped end their lives. Okay, hell, now that I’ve stuck my toe into these murky waters I might as well dive all the way in and speak about what goes largely unspoken, at least to those outside of the Progressive MS club. Any number of studies suggest that suicide be listed among the consequences of Multiple Sclerosis, since so many late stage MSers decide to take matters into their own hands. In my many conversations with other people with Progressive MS, I’ve found that most have formulated some sort of escape plan, some in only vague terms but others down to the last detail.

Anybody who would condemn folks for having such thoughts need to keenly consider the gaping abyss people with advancing Progressive MS stare into on a daily basis as their thus far untreatable disease drags them ever forward towards the dark at the end of the tunnel. The relief expressed at finally being able to give voice to such taboo thoughts is just about universal among those I’ve communicated with, and is cathartic in its own right. Almost never shared with outsiders, most of the people who have related their thoughts and plans with me find them not self-defeating but rather self-empowering, bracing them to suck it up and fight on secure in the knowledge that if the fight becomes just too brutal and the climb to steep they’ve given themselves permission to call it a life. And in that there is no shame.

Let me assure all concerned that I’m not suicidal. I’m too damned angry to be suicidal. I’ve so far taken all of the wallops that this disease has meted out and found ways to fight back, and though I’m afraid I’ve not managed to land many blows on my disease itself, I take comfort in the knowledge that I may have in some tiny way helped a few of my fellow travelers on this torturous path to better navigate it by sharing the load even as I unburden myself on these pages. One of my oldest friends long ago described me as the most optimistic pessimist he’d ever met. I guess it’s this odd emotional mix that helps keep me going, half expecting that this hair-raising downward trajectory that has me in its grip will ultimately turn out to be a ski jump, and in the end the momentum gathered during this freefall will be transformed into escape velocity, allowing me to soar higher than I ever imagined.

Yeah, wishful thinking perhaps, but on the day of my diagnosis I vowed that if this disease was going to bring me down I was going to go down with all guns blazing, fists bloodied and mouth spewing venom. And should this descent turn out not to be the launchpad of my fantasies, if I ever do decide to pull the ripcord, let that act not be viewed as defeat but rather a final kick to the nuts of the monster. Stay strong, my friends; together we may not beat this horror, but we’ll damn well keep on trying.