Tag Archives: multiple sclerosis
August 5, 2012 No wait, this is stupid!
If you get strep throat (which I just did), you go to a doctor and get antibiotics. Right? This is how you fix strep throat.
If you break a bone, you get a cast.
If you trip and fall, you pick yourself back up and if you cut open your finger, you put a band-aid on it.
We seem to have very standard ways of dealing with a lot of problems that can happen to our bodies. If any of the above things happened to me and I didn’t follow the courses of action that I outlined, you would wonder why, right?
If I got strep throat but told you that I wasn’t really convinced that antibiotics would help it, you might be a little confused.
For some reason, people seem to think that this isn’t how it should be for some diseases. For instance, we’re supposed to be chill with the fact that Ann Romney, along with many other MS patients, has chosen to not take any medication.
What? Apparently the PC thing to do about that is to not say anything. We can’t comment because it’s her choice and we can’t laugh at her stupid horse therapy (“hippotherapy,” whatever) and we can’t make value judgments because apparently she has made her own logical choice.
I’m really tired of this.
She’s being irresponsible. She’s opening herself up to the possibility of being literally struck down with an MS relapse at any time which could put her in a wheelchair or cause full-body paralysis or cause her to become incontinent or cause blurred vision or nausea or vertigo or… the list is pretty damn long.
When I’m relapsing, my vertigo is too strong for me to walk. I can’t eat anything without throwing it back up. I can’t take a shower without collapsing on the bathroom floor. I go to the ER and they give me one drug after another until I’m too exhausted for them to do anything else and then they send me home. My (wonderful) friends and family drop everything to take care of me. When I’m relapsing, what I want is to just sleep through it. Since I’m a responsible person, I’m on a drug (Copaxone) which reduces my relapses by 30%. I have an illness/disease/condition/new-best-friend-for-life/whatever you want to call it, and I treat it. Because that is the logical thing to do.
Aside from all the other crap that Mitt Romney does (see my last post for some details), do we really want a president whose wife is a ticking time bomb? At any moment, she could relapse, and all his attention would have to be on her. As it should be, since they’re married. But all his attention wouldn’t be on her because he loves her or because she has MS, it would be because she’s irresponsible, and she’s put herself in a precarious position. I have no respect for that. And neither should you.
Tags: ann romney, copaxone, doctors, idiots, illness, medication, medicine, mitt romney, MS, multiple sclerosis, politics, responsibility
June 29, 2012 A Very Happy Day
Yesterday was a very happy day. Why? Well, in case you (somehow) hadn’t heard, Obamacare passed.
From CNN: ”the law makes it illegal for any health insurance plan to use pre-existing conditions to exclude, limit or set unrealistic rates on coverage”
Hey. You guys. That means me. And anyone else out there with MS. We can all get insurance now.
Which is great, because my medications cost around $5,000 a month without insurance. Luckily, I’ve been on my parents’ plan so I’ve never had to pay anywhere close to that. But, not gonna lie, I was totally freaked out about what would happen after I couldn’t be on their plan anymore. How would I get a job right out of college that was good enough to get me good insurance? While many young adults are healthy and would simply not get insurance so they didn’t have to spend the money, that was never going to be an option for me.
Some thoughts I have on health insurance:
1. There are a lot of people on the internet who are talking about Obamacare like it’s some big conspiracy to get us all to buy something that we don’t need. No, this is just how civilized countries do it. I know we’re a little backward (especially here in PA, where we apparently don’t allow expert witness testimony in trials… what?) but this is good news. Universal healthcare is a good idea. People being healthy is good.
2. Our public health insurance system is a little convoluted, and I’m hoping that now that more people will be on public health insurance, the system can be reexamined and fixed. If you’re not sure what I mean by convoluted, here’s an example: A woman who is already on the California version of Medicaid, Medi-Cal, who needs breast or cervical cancer screening, must also apply to the Breast and Cervical Cancer Treatment Program (BCCTP) and then, if she also needs screening or treatment for cardiovascular problems, must sign up for a third program, WISEWOMAN. There’s no good reason for those to be three separate programs, as far as I can tell, and I spent a semester studying the whole system. Hopefully Obamacare will lead to some streamlining of public health insurance!
3. Many people seem to be upset about the “healthy” people taking care of the “sick” people. This is really bizarre to me. Health is not a permanent condition. People always ask me how I got MS, and they always seem to be hoping for it to be something that I did. They want to blame it on me (do I drink? do I smoke? do I not eat enough vegetables? do I not exercise enough? do I watch too much TV? do I get enough sleep?) so that they can have some way of avoiding it. If they can figure out what I did “wrong,” then they can just not do it and stay healthy. That’s not how it works. One day I was healthy and the next day I woke up nauseous. One day I thought I might have Lyme disease and the next day I knew I had MS. For a lot of diseases, it’s not about doing something “wrong.” They just come out of nowhere. Cancer can hit anyone. MS can too. Healthy people are not likely to stay that way, and perhaps they should be a little bit nicer about taking care of us “sick” people. Because they’re probably paying it forward.
4. People’s idea of “expensive” medical care is very strange to me. In a class I took last semester, a professor defined “expensive” medical care as being $5,000 per year. As I already mentioned, my meds are $5,000 per month. AKA $60,000 per year. When I first tried to talk about this to some of my friends, I wasn’t explaining it that well, and their response was “yeah, but you’re not the average person.” The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that many other people are in my situation. My syringes cost $143 each and can only be used once. I need one per day. That’s true for everyone on Copaxone. There’s probably a similar cost for other injectable medications as well, including medications for diabetics and blood-thinners. Sometimes it seems like people are mad at those who use the ER for doctor’s visits because they don’t have insurance or people who are on a lot of prescription meds that they don’t need, and think of those people as the only ones with “expensive” medical care. That makes “expensive” medical care seem unnecessary. That’s not the case for those of us with chronic illness, and I think our situation needs to be publicized and discussed. We have “expensive” medical care, in numbers too big for a lot of people to even fathom. And it’s very, very necessary.
Aside from that, apparently CNN mis-announced the results at first, leading to a slew of highly embarrassing “Goodbye Obamacare!” happy facebook statuses. I love when Republicans look dumb. Lucky for me, the Tea Party keeps talking!
TL;DR health insurance is important for sick people, and healthy people don’t always stay that way so they should be happy too. Yay Obamacare!
Tags: copaxone, health insurance, healthy people, MS, multiple sclerosis, multiple sclerosis ninja, obamacare, republicans, sick people, tea party
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June 22, 2012 Jack Osbourne is Not Dying
…and other common misconceptions about multiple sclerosis!
If you happen to go to the grocery store and peruse the magazines, you’ll notice that the cover of the current issue of People is the story of Jack Osbourne’s very recent MS diagnosis. (here‘s the version that they put online, very abridged)
Um, to the writers of People articles, do you get your medical information from the 1980s or something? Just a few quick quotes from their terribly researched article:
-“..symptoms could flare up as seldom as every several years, though they usually grow more frequent and debilitating as a patient gets older”
-“MS usually begins with symptoms that come and go. It typically progresses over 15 to 20 years into a more debilitating form that leaves some in wheelchairs.”
-“MS attacks the brain, and in its relapsing-remitting early phase, which Osbourne has, causes fluctuating symptoms.”
-and most wonderfully, from the cover “‘I won’t let my son die’ Sharon and Jack Osbourne on the diagnosis that has the 26-year-old fighting to save his vision, his future and his life.”
To clear up all the misinformation that you guys just read: MS no longer necessarily progresses, patients diagnosed today with relapsing/remitting MS (RRMS) typically have a 25% or less chance of ending up in a wheelchair, and um, RRMS is not an “early phase” for some more horrible version. People, you suck.
But Jack Osbourne, man, you rock. Here are some better quotes (which amusingly contradict all the crap that People is trying to tell us in the exact same article):
-“Right now am I going to be in a wheelchair? No. But if I don’t take care of myself, who knows.”
-“There’s no rhyme or reason. That’s the worst part. You can go to bed feeling fine, and you can wake up and your leg might not work.”
-“I think within the next 20 years they’re going to have a cure for this.”
-“I think when people hear that you have MS, they think, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, your life is over,’ but my life is far from over”
So I’m currently tweeting at Jack (I am really bad at tweeting) and hoping that he’ll click over to my website, because I wanna be MS friends with him. Jack, if you clicked my link:
Hi!
Do you want an MS friend? I’m pretty low-key. I have Clay Walker’s phone number and didn’t give it to anyone. Also I was the flower girl in Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s wedding and I haven’t even sold the dress on E-Bay. So I’m probably kind of trustworthy. The things you said in the article were super-cool, sorry that People writers are douchebags who don’t even know to wikipedia a disease before they write about it. Contact me in some way pretty please! We can try to figure out what Race to Erase MS even is (since it’s not an actual race) (with that name it should clearly be some sort of walkathon!) and talk about Copaxone. I’ve been on it for over a year now, gross.
Thanks and Vitamin D to you,
Cade
Oh, and uh, People? MS doesn’t kill you.
Tags: copaxone, diagnosis, jack osbourne, multiple sclerosis, people magazine
June 4, 2012 First Floor Fanatic
Hey again interwebs,
I’m fairly bad at predicting what I’m going to want to write about. Actually I think my brain rebels against it. Every time I’ve said I’m going to write about something, I’ve turned around and gone to pretty much the opposite of that topic. I don’t know what’s up with that. Consider this my apology for doing it yet again.
Today what I want to talk about is accessibility. Accessibility is a really big deal, and I think a lot of people are really used to buildings being accessible in the US. Probably because that’s how it should be? Yeah, that. I’m fairly used to seeing ramps and elevators. It’s a good thing.
Wesleyan doesn’t seem to agree. Wesleyan Students for Disability Rights (WSDR) founder Allegra just emailed our listserv asking for thoughts on Wesleyan’s accreditation self-study in regards to disability, and here are my thoughts.
In the accreditation self-study, Wesleyan says “Limited funding, steep topography, and numerous historic buildings challenged the University’s ability to satisfy accessibility needs without compromising the historic character of the campus.”
I love Wes and everything, but I didn’t realize our semi-shitty classroom buildings were so “historic” that we couldn’t possibly add a couple ramps and elevators without “compromising” them. And ya know, those works of art that are the Foss dorms probably couldn’t be contaminated with wheelchair access either. I think it wouldn’t be a big deal. I think the more honest answer is the “limited funding,” since it’s becoming less and less of a secret that Wes is a bit strapped for cash (need-blind? What?).
I decided to do a little bit of lazy “research” and found that 25 of Wesleyan’s buildings are listed as “first floor access only” (sometimes worded differently than that) on their disability accessibility map page thingy. And not every building is even listed. Including my house, where not even the first floor is accessible. That’s not awesome, Wesleyan. First floors are usually not all there is to a building. Classes aren’t always on first floors, our friends’ dorm rooms aren’t always on the first floor, that art show we want to see or lecture we want to hear isn’t always on the first floor. This is a little bizarre.
I’m not affected by this right now in that I’m not in a wheelchair.* In fact, I’m pretty sure that no current Wesleyan student is wheelchair-bound. I don’t really think that’s a coincidence. I think that if you’re a student looking at colleges and you’re in a wheelchair and you come to Wesleyan, you’re probably going to look around and realize it’s not the place for you. And that means we’re losing people who could be awesome members of our community.
I don’t know if other colleges do it better, to be honest. But I do know that Wesleyan is an awesome place that I love a lot, and I wish the community could hold itself to a high standard of accessibility and acceptance of disability. (Kinda like we do for the LGBTQ community, do many colleges have this going on? Didn’t think so) And let everyone get to WestCo wine and cheese.
*but the cool thing about MS is that I could be in a wheelchair at any moment (plot twist!), and if so, I like to think that I’d be able to stay at (and still love) Wesleyan
Tags: accessibility, accreditation self study, disability, disability rights, multiple sclerosis, Wesleyan, wesleyan students, wheelchairs
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March 24, 2012 Thoughts On Home and Magic
Home and Magic are two things that I maybe didn’t fully believe in until after the past two days.
Home is a thing that’s hard for me to define. There are places that feel like home and can be clearly defined that way: my family’s house in Gettysburg, for sure. It is the address I put for “permanent address” on forms, it is the place where I can stay up until 4 AM and walk around in my underwear without worrying. It is where my parents, brothers, and pets live, it is where I spend my breaks from school. Having just left it, I do feel homesick. Especially for my mommy, who writes such nice blog posts about my messy room.
But it’s in a town that’s not home. I’m going to awkwardly quote Bowling for Soup now:
I hope this song finds you well.
And I hope that you’re doin’ fuckin’ swell.
I hope that you’re back up if you’ve ever been down.
And I hope that you got the fuck out of our hometown.
I try not to refer to Gettysburg as my hometown, although it is a town which my home is in.
But then, my parents’ house isn’t my only home. I was very much reminded of that today.
Being back in Provincetown is surreal. I walk around town and everything seems less colorful than I remembered it. Smaller than I remembered it. The problem with being a child in a place and then leaving is you have this image of all streets as wide, all flags as bright. FAWC, where my dad used to be director, seemed familiar but not quite right. There was the place a cat scratched me (I was just trying to be friends!), the little house on the quad where we lived, the newly renovated offices that used to have swinging doors that I would skip through. Memories of silent auctions and days spent sitting under wooden staircases, telling myself stories.
Commercial Street was also strange. I found the coffee place where my mom would buy me muffins and scones (lemon poppyseed was my favorite, I think), but it was closed for the off-season. I found two places that sold salt-water taffy, and, wanting to buy some for myself and my brothers, I was torn. They were across the street from each other, I could remember being in both stores. Which one was better? Did I have a preference, ten years ago? I chose the one whose door was hanging open, it seemed more welcoming, but I instantly regretted it. It felt touristy and fake, the other one, out the window, looked more family-owned and homey. I was shamed, a tourist in a town that had once been home. I bought taffy and left, annoyed.
But then. Magic! My dad and I went over to Pat‘s house before going out to dinner with her. Everything was exactly as I had remembered it. Pat’s house is unchanged, but also organic and living. Her new dog, a wolf mix (70% wolf, Pat thinks) barked at me and I remembered that I was a stranger and that things were new, I guess, even if everything seemed perfectly congruent to my memories.
Pat’s old dog, Atisha, had been my peer as a child. We were the under-table dwellers, those who played with tennis balls, the shorter-than-everyone twosome. I had hung out with her in a den of pillows and sheepskin under a table, that den was still there. It looked impossibly small. Paintings, some by Pat and some by others, covered the walls. Plants grew everywhere. Outside, we could see the beach.
I can say “I never lived there, it is not my home.” But I was alive there, and it felt like home, so maybe that’s not true. I have no concept of how much time I actually spent there, if the way I feel about the house as a place is reasonable or deserved. If I am just one of many children who feels that they grew there, though maybe not up. Maybe just better.
Home for me is also a weird concept I guess because of the whole long distance relationship thing. A part of my home is always with Ari (oh hey) even though we’ve never lived in the same place. Teenage love is very self-centered, though I just told my dad that compared to other teenagers, Ari seems about 50 years old. In a good way. I have an old-person’s disease (so people tell me) so I guess we’re both secretly elderly.
Next year my home will be a little less torn. Ari got into Wesleyan. Real tears of joy happened on my end (Dad was very amused). I guess that’s a little magic too. I’m not the “tears of joy” type (usually).
I’m really happy right now.
PS: sorry about the pictures of Pat’s house. It was a terrible moment when I realized that I was in one of the most magical places in the world and only had my cell phone as a camera. Atisha’s grave is the first picture, the rest are inside Pat’s house.
Tags: boyfriend, happiness, happy, multiple sclerosis, Provincetown, travel, Wesleyan
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February 17, 2012 WHOA!
GUYZ. Click this. I’m so (prematurely) excited. Injections suck.
Although, I’m a little freaked out by the thought of Copaxone side effects happening at a certain time every night and me not having any control over it…. other than that, this is awesome. 
Tags: cade, cnn, injections, medical stuff, mslifeisbestlife, multiple sclerosis, news, spinal tapped
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February 3, 2012 The Existential Blog Crisis
(since classes have started and I have no time, I thought I’d post this weird thing that I wrote at like 5AM at some point over break) (an update post is coming this weekend, I promise!)
I don’t spend a lot of time contemplating whether I exist. “Waiting for Godot” (please pronounce it God-oh when you say it in your head) is my all-time absolute head-over-heels favorite play, and the fundamental question (back to AP English) is “Am I?” but it’s not a question I ask. When my friend Wes was having an existential crisis, he asked me if I ever thought about that stuff. I guess if I have to think about that stuff, I’d say we do exist, because there’s not a good alternative. Nobody’s imagination is that layered (and cruel) that they dreamed up all the stuff that happens in the world (ya know, genocide, AIDS, famine, diabetes, Michele Bachmann…). And I think our lives would be more unpredictable if we were just dreamed up. I don’t know. Like I said, it’s not an avenue of thought that I go down.
However, I am having an existential blog crisis.
Does my blog exist? I’m not really sure. Do any websites exist? Do online personalities exist? Does writing exist if it’s only online and not printed? Do things have to be tangible? Too many questions!
And then with my blog specifically: is it a disease blog if I’m in denial about being diseased?
Yeah, okay, I said it. I’m in some serious denial. Wouldn’t you be? Nobody wants to hear at age eighteen that suddenly their life is on a completely different path that they can’t veer off of.
It makes me think about choosing majors (again). My dad pointed out that what I major in Does. Not. Actually. Matter. Whoa. I could major in whatever, and as long as I got decent grades (ha. hahaha) I could just enroll in the Bryn Mawr pre-med one-year magic program-y-thing and still go to medical school. I could major in dance and art if I felt like it (or, ya know, was good at either of those things). So no matter what I do with this particular decision, I can still ditch that path later.
I keep using walking metaphors (paths, avenues) which is probably because my favorite method of thinking is to just start walking somewhere. Especially in high school when everything, every fight every breakup every text message, seemed so significant and painful and urgent, it felt weird to take public transportation somewhere. I guess sitting on a train felt too stationary. So I walked.
Then, for me, to be stuck on one road seems inconceivable. Couldn’t I just turn right up at that corner and go be healthy? Couldn’t I stop, tie my shoe, window-shop, delay the progressiveness that is MS?
Is it really a disease blog if I refuse to feel diseased?
PS: if you are actually having an existential crisis please do not click here because it’ll just make you sadder about the world.
Tags: cade, denial, disease, existence, god-oh, insomnia is for winners, it's not g'doh, life, maybe i should join the beckett society, mslifeisbestlife, multiple sclerosis, musing, overtiredness, samuel beckett, spinal tapped, thinking, this is not the simpsons, thoughts, time, waiting for godot
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January 11, 2012 Literally Every Vote Counts
…in my election. AKA my poll. One reader voted for me to write more about College so I’m going to write about College. Speaking of which, vote in my poll and YOU TOO could see your chosen topic turned into a rant by me. Er… anyway…
College is kind of a weird limbo state. Let me explain.
You’re working, but you’re not really working.
You can drink as much as you want, and nobody will call you an alcoholic.
You can break laws, but not feel like a criminal.
You’re surrounded by all different kinds of people, but they’re all the same age as you.
You get to “live independently,” but can be arbitrarily ordered to live with someone you’ve never met.
You pay to go there, but the people you’re paying don’t have to do anything nice for you.
See what I mean? Or maybe not, maybe that’s just my weird view. Regardless, I love college (oh hey Asher Roth, you’re right, college is fantastic). College is a nice break from the real world where people indulge you and make you feel like you’re in the real world. I guess it’s a good transition for us late adolescents whose brains haven’t fully developed yet (although mine has already started decaying).
Anyway, I get the feeling that said pro-college-voter-person didn’t just want to hear about the theory of college junk that I’m suddenly spouting. Let’s talk about my college experience.
When I first got to Wes, I wanted to double major in Biology (to indulge my weird new science-geek hobby) and Government (my so-called “true” interest) and be pre-law and go to law school and feel all smart and argue with people so we could all show how smart we were and so on. And then be a public defender (just to show that I wasn’t completely shallow). Then, suddenly, I got MS. Curveballll. The whole Government thing seemed pointless suddenly, like why would I do that? It wouldn’t mean anything to me. Suddenly, I was pre-med.
Backtracking a little bit, all the way back to age 5: this is the year when I found out that the sight of blood made me pass out and have seizures. And not just sight, reading about a bloody thing in a book (like, say, the final scene in the second Harry Potter book) would leave me unconscious (and face-down in a plate of waffles. That’s what I get for reading at the table). This whole passing out at inopportune moments thing continued for the next 13 years. Which meant a lot of concussions, and even a chipped tooth (“you look like you got in a fight with the floor. And the floor won.”-my mother, circa 8th grade).
So, as you can imagine, when former teachers run into my mom at the grocery store and ask about me (I’m so popular) (jkjk) and hear that I’m pre-med, they’re pretty shocked. Hey, me too. I watched a frog heart continue to beat in a beaker of saline last year and stayed upright, mind over matter baby.
Anyway, back to the college thing. The problem I’m having now is that I’m still a little bit attached to Government. The Government department at Wes is so popular that it’s pretty impossible to get into courses, and yet somehow I am enrolled in two Gov courses next semester. Whaaaat. I want to take them so badly. They both sound fantastic. But, here’s the catch. To be a double major in Gov and Bio, you need a GPA that I just don’t have. And since pretty much everyone at Wes double majors (we don’t have minors), I’m feeling some serious pressure to ditch my Gov love and find another major to do. English looks like it’ll work, but to be an English major I’ll have to drop at least one of those precious Gov classes. What to do?? I’m very torn.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Should I just take 6.5 credits next semester and hope death will at least be painless?
Also, as my friend Elizabeth and my mom have both noted, I should really link you guys over to the Office of Admissions blog that I write for. clicky clicky. Coolest job ever.
ALSO to the voter who voted that I should write about “Pandas” (and who is not my 15 year old brother, who I suspected), here is a panda for you:
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I don’t actually have anything to say about the panda. But I keep promises. Hope you like your panda, anonymous panda lover.
Tags: cade, college, mslifeisbestlife, multiple sclerosis, musings, polls, readers, sleep, spinal tapped, thinking, thoughts
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January 11, 2012 Naranja y Nada
Under the dorm complex where I lived freshmen year, there are tunnels (that supposedly used to connect the entire campus instead of just the three surrounding dorms) which now are covered in graffiti. Well, actually, I don’t know if they were covered with graffiti back when they were in use too. The laundry room is down there, which I think is the only reason we were allowed to go down. Sometimes another door to another tunnel had been left unlocked and we could go exploring.
We found one room last year that just had trays and trays of rocks, labeled, stacked sloppily. We found a room full of old books. We found, on the wall, a long breakup speech written in sharpie. I doubt the person who it was intended for ever found it. And if they had, how would they have known it was for them? It wasn’t very specific
In case you can’t tell, I’m a little bit sad today. I took a red-eye back home from Seattle last night/this morning and I wish I hadn’t. I guess I don’t talk about it much, but being in a long-distance relationship is hard. We’ve been making it work (some times more so than others) for 2.5 years now though, so I guess we’re pretty pro?
Anyway, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about time. The picture above is from the aforementioned tunnels, and it made me think about what I was saying before about staying up late, all night even, for no reason.
Hours have started going faster for me, I think. Hours spent in boring lectures or MRI machines or cramped family roadtrips (dear parents, get a minivan…) seem to pass much faster than they did before. Maybe it’s because as we grow older, an hour becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of our lives? That’s maybe a bit too poetic.
My doctor says that there is a 75% chance that I will still be walking in 10 years. I think he’s kind of ignoring (on purpose) that 25% chance of me being in a wheelchair at age 28. At least I’ll be done with medical school by then, but it still seems pretty young. And I don’t get how a 30% medication (what I wrote about in my last post) is supposed to sound like a giant percentage, but 25% is supposed to sound small.
When I’m just alone at night I have to think about things like this instead of getting to sit up late talking with my boyfriend about anything and everything. I remember when we first met, we walked around Barcelona for several hours just talking and drinking an incredibly disgusting kind of orange juice. Those hours felt pretty short too. Hey love, this one’s for you. Miss you.
Tags: cade, love, medication, mslifeisbestlife, multiple sclerosis, musings, Seattle, spinal tapped, thinking, thoughts, time, travel, wheelchairs
