The boxer

I’m celebrating Valentine's Day with a faintly embarrassing outpouring of affection, and here it is: I love my body.

There, I’ve said it. I do.

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t stand in front of the mirror every morning and evening talking outloud to it and affirming its loveliness, I am British for goodness sake.

I’m also not saying it’s picture perfect even in the kindest of subdued lighting. But on the whole, I think it’s great.

And the reason I think it’s great, the reason I don’t hate it despite all the limitations it has or has the potential to have, is this: my body is not letting me down. A disease is letting me down.

In my mind, they are two very, very different things.

I see my body as an increasingly knackered team member that is still managing to turn out for my side.

In the words of those irritating Prescott botherers Chumbawumba, it’s got knocked down, but it gets up again.

Because even if, as the widely held theory suggests, MS is an auto-immune disease and my body is attacking itself, then I still prefer to think it’s simply a bit bewildered rather than just plain mean.

It can’t help the random spasms, it can’t help the skewed temperature sensations, it can’t help the stabbing face pain and it can’t help the thoughts-in-a-spin-cycle.

It is not my body’s fault.

And while it fails and falters, it also tries its very, very hardest to help.

So far, it’s managed to heal claw its way back from a number of pretty hefty relapses. Alright, it may never have been a 100 per cent recovery and alright, it might hold part of the damage back and unleash it again when I’m too tired/too cold/have a virus/sat in a hot bath for too long.

But generally, it’s on my side and it’s fighting very hard to stay there.

However, I am fully aware that this state of affairs is subject to change and at some point, my body is likely to stop healing quite as well as it has done to date.

There’s only a certain amount of times myelin can repair to an acceptable level before the damage really starts to hit and more significant and permanent disability develops. 

So far I have been lucky, I have repaired to a reasonable degree. Even if each relapse has left a lingering mucky footprint on my balance, pain, sensation, cognition or vision.

I don't know how much longer this ability to mostly repair will last. And honestly, it's best not to dwell.

So while it’s sometimes been on the losing side in the skirmishes, while it can’t always make me completely better, I would officially like to thank my body for repeatedly lacing up its gloves and stepping into the ring.

:: The boxer by Simon and Garfunkel

Help!

I get the train to work.

I like it. Generally it runs on time, I get a free newspaper and I can people watch (one of my favourite things.)

It also lets me wind down after a day in the office and I can think about dinner/read a book/switch off without causing a road accident.

This week it’s also let me do a little bit of thinking about employment, employers and some of the practical help I’ve needed to keep me in a job.

My working life has seen me in the private then the public and now the third sector – quite a variety, but the one common thread is that it has never been easy being at work and having MS.

Surprisingly however, some of the hardest battles I’ve had weren’t with my employers – who have generally been quite understanding and supportive, if a little bewildered by the vagaries of the condition – but with the people ostensibly put there to help.

Access to Work was a particular struggle. Great idea, rubbish execution.

Not the lovely man who came to sort me out with fancy office equipment and an impressive James Bond-esque villain’s chair. (Although still slightly disappointed by the lack of ejector seat, take note office suppliers.)

But the woman on the end of the phone being incredibly difficult about the process by which to claim transport to the office. The woman who quite clearly didn’t believe I was unwell even though I had a letter from my medical team, copies of my scans and occupational health reports. Plus I had wobbly tear voice on the phone so it must have been true.

Perhaps I just got a jaded fed-up worker, perhaps she’d seen a few scams (although the whole flippin thing is so complicated and exhausting I almost, almost, take my hat off to anyone who can scam the benefits system) perhaps I was unlucky enough to just speak to a bit of a jobsworth.

Perhaps she was secretly just trying to save me from the taxi drivers. This may have been it as the taxi/passenger conversations during the time I needed to use cabs were quite eye-opening.*

Or perhaps I should stop excusing her.

Perhaps people who deal with claimants with chronic variable illnesses could do with a bit more training and understanding about chronic variable illnesses.

That would seem to make sense.

:: Help! By The Beatles

*They ranged from the mundane – weather, potholes – to the wholly unexpected; marital guilt (theirs), how to fiddle taxi claim receipts and the fertility issues of two separate cabbies. I unwittingly became a trapped confidante in some sort of mobile secular confessional.