It's hard to know for sure because they have, to date, been impressively dramatic affairs. Full of ambulance trips! Intense pain! Or rapid deterioration!
Nothing like a turbo charged MS relapse to add a bit of spice to an otherwise perfectly pleasant day.
But at the moment, I'm just incredibly tired and my eyes feel a bit 'off.'
There's been no obvious optic neuritis pain, no stark loss of either colour or normal vision that I've experienced previously. But given that both eyes have already been damaged, it's hard to know whether this 'off-ness' is new or just exaggerated by exhaustion.
I've been sleeping from 8pm and struggling through anything even slightly taxing in the day. I've been in floods of tears over a work email - it wasn't even a complicated one, I just couldn't get my brain in gear and in the end decide the only viable option was theatrical weeping.
It's all horribly unnerving. I hate many aspects of MS but the one that causes me the most concern is eyesight. I try not to dwell too much on this because it's not sensible to do so, but for me it's a real fear.
So I am really, really hoping that the tiredness I'm experiencing combined with the oddly gloomy-then-brighter light at this time of year is the cause and it will pass.
I've lived with this disease long enough to know that tiredness and general under-the-weatherness can resurrect old symptoms*, but that doesn't mean I'm completely rational about it.
I suspect it's because a lot of the time we can trundle along, accepting and absorbing the symptoms and subsequent damage into our lives until the different becomes the normal.
But it just takes one patch of uncertainty to remind us that our bodies and brains are the unwilling hosts to a merciless ticking timebomb.
:: Timebomb by Chumbawumba
*The MS Trust talks about the relapse-or-not-relapse in their Managing Relapses guide.
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