In a way
which is very, very different to the Fifty Shades sort, I have recently
experienced pleasurable pain.
Yes.
No
restraints, compulsive lip biting or red rooms required for this one, just a
pair of humble high heels.
And the
reason for the joy is that – my feet hurt!
The soles
of my feet hurt!!
The soles
of my feet which have not been able to feel anything for almost 10 years, they
hurt!!!
I’d
noticed in the summer that the feeling had started to come back to my feet but the sensation got a really good workout recently at my friend’s
wedding where there was lots of emotion, lots of prosecco and a helluva lot of
dancing.
And by
the end of the night, as the band played themselves out, I was finally able to join
the cohorts of ladies rubbing the soles of their feet and cursing their fancy
shoes.
I haven’t
been able to do that for nearly a decade.
It was a
curiously pleasant pain because it confirmed the return of sensation, something
I had feared was long gone.
It’s a
pain I welcome, rather than one of the many sorts of MS pain which I really
don’t.
Interestingly, up until the 1980s,
MS was thought to be a painless disease. It was presumably thought of as this
by medical types who didn’t have the disease and therefore didn’t actually know how ruddy painful it can be.
Types of
MS pain I have experienced, in a countdown of hideousness:
5) L’Hermitte’s
Sign – a sensation similar to that of an electric shock running down the spine
when the head is bent forward. Makes washing hair over the bath an
impossibility.
4) MS hug
– it’s really not friendly
3) Optic
neuritis – stabbing pain whenever I move my eye a fraction followed by sight
loss you say? Not today, thanks.
2)
Trigeminal neuralgia – nicknamed the suicide disease. Horrible.
1) I
don’t actually know the proper term for this one, but it was worse than labour.
And I can say that as I’ve done both. It started in the night as a severe
burning pain across my stomach. This then led to screaming agony, paramedics and gas
and air (pointless) as the sensations spread across my entire body and there
was no way to be that wasn’t pain. My neurologist suspected that all the nerves
in my body had gone into spasm all at once. For more than five hours. Heralded a
relapse, obviously, but I took the view that the resultant destruction of
sensation from my chest down was worth it to get rid of the pain that started
it.
So the
recent normal, high-heeled, dancing pain has been something of a pleasure. Which is
just as well as I have another wedding in a couple of week’s time.
Bring on
the dancefloor.
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