Mr Brightside

Perspective. Comparisons. Sliding scales.

They’re all interesting phrases when applied to the way you view things – wealth, achievements, career, family, life. Illness.

Like a number of chronic diseases, the perceived seriousness of MS sits on shifting sands depending on who you speak to.

Perhaps you’ve dealt with reactions from people at the oh-it’s-not-so-bad end of the scale. They’ve seen someone being amazing on the Paralympics with it. Or know a friend’s mum who has had it for 25 years and still doesn’t need a walking stick. Perhaps they know someone who works fulltime and goes to the gym every other day?

On the other hand, perhaps they’re at the other end of the scale and they’ve got a pretty bleak outlook for you. Maybe they’ve cared for someone with the primary progressive form? Watched someone deteriorate before their eyes? Seen someone in the end stages of MS?

It’s entirely possible you’ve dealt with these – and many opinions in between – from the medical community.

During the summer I saw a gp I don’t normally see. He asked how I was generally and we had a general chat about MS and recent research.

He concluded by saying it would be good for his newly-diagnosed patients to see me still working and with a family.

“Because really, for you, it’s just an inconvenience,” he finished. With a reassuring smile, believing he’d said the right thing.

And, if I take a deep breath to calm down and think about that proclamation, then to some degree he was right. I’m currently not hugely debilitated. I still work, drive and most of the time I appear to function like everyone else.

To a gp, who is bound to come across far more aggressive cases, he may well believe he could describe my MS as ‘an inconvenience’ and there’s a little bit of me that sort of accepts that.

But to me an inconvenience means a flat tyre or the radiators needing bleeding or running out of teabags.

It does not mean slipping down the workforce ladder because I know I couldn’t manage it or missing most of the things healthy people take for granted or making the painful decision to not extend our family.

None of these things would I describe as ‘an inconvenience.’

So while I do recognise that I am somewhere in the middle of the health-death track bar, I think we would all like recognition of our own personal scales and a bit more consideration of what might actually count as our inconvenience.

:: Mr Brightside by The Killers

I am woman

Four days.

Four days is all it’s taken to go from gp referral to diagnosis to hospital treatment.

Lord knows the NHS has its critics who spell out the many reasons why it’s not perfect, but to me it is a beacon of brilliance.

I was fast tracked. My gp had examined me and looked quite worried - never an emotion you want to see cross a gp’s face – so referred me immediately. I had an appointment yesterday at the one-stop breast care clinic at our local hospital.

To say that the care was professional, reassuring and compassionate is a massive, massive understatement.

I had a mammogram (not as uncomfortable as I feared), ultrasound (sticky) and treatment with a consultant (reassuring) all within two hours.

~ I also was given a bonus lesson in how to tie my hospital robe up properly. Useful as I have an MRI pending and I will not have to do my usual flail around in the changing room and hobble to the tube while grabbing onto the ties and trying very hard not to flash other unsuspecting patients. ~

And it turned out that it was a huge cyst. A great whacking sack of breast fluid created thanks to a) my age and b) my hormones.

It was drained – no anaesthetic needed – within minutes. Yes, it might come back and I’ll need to keep being aware but I was done and okay. And I have never been more grateful.

I’d attended the appointment with my long-suffering hubby who has supported me through my many and varied MS issues. He is utterly brilliant.

But I was also struck by the emotion I felt towards the other women sitting in that waiting room. Women hunched holding hands with partners or compulsively clutching their gowns or staring blankly at the ‘breast check’ posters. All with the big, dark eyes and pale, pinched faces of worry.

Faces that had spent days panicking. Or covering up panic because they can’t worry their partners, or their children, their family or their friends. Or panicking only now because they can’t quite believe they would ever have to be here and now they are and its hit them.

And then there were the women who had no one with them, who had made that frightening journey on their own and who might later be making tear-stained phone calls, walking out alone along the sterile corridors.

As I sat waiting for my results it seemed the only, only thing to do was to hope that all of us got out of there with good news – that this unspoken waiting room solidarity could somehow guard us all.

I have no idea what happened to the other women. I don’t know if my silent hope worked. But for one day our lives touched and I felt an overwhelming surge of protection towards my team; my frightened, waiting women.

:: I am woman by Helen Reddy