Ground Down By Stress
Coming to terms with MS (Multiple Sclerosis)
The diagnosis of MS was devastating for us. For those who don’t know, it is an autoimmune disease where the protein coating of the nerve pathways is attacked by your own immune system. It causes lesions on the brain and spinal chord that delay or stop messages to the body. Almost any part of the body can be affected, depending on exactly where the lesions are.
The type of MS that Mandy has is called primary progressive. This means that you have the symptoms all the time and they get worse over time. You just don’t know how bad it will get or how quickly. There is no cure for MS and for primary progressive MS there are no treatments to relieve the symptoms. There is also very little research.
Bad decision
We had no idea what was going to happen to Mandy. A first thought was that she might not be able to carry on working. That meant that I couldn’t afford to lose my job. I should have said that her condition would make commuting impossible for me. Instead, I let it be the reason to accept the office move.
If I had stuck to my guns then, things might have turned out differently. I could have asked for more help to find a local job. But I wasn’t in a resourceful state at the time and made the wrong decision as a result. So then I had to start to live with it.
The daily grind
With Mandy becoming less able, I tried to take on more of the domestic chores. Then in June 2006, I began the daily commute. I got up at 5am in order to leave home at 6 and start work at 7:30. By taking only one 20 minute break during the day, I was able to leave at 3:15pm and get home by 5pm to 5:30 or sometimes later.
Then, most days I would cook and wash up and try to keep up with the cleaning. Weekends were mainly for catching up with the other household chores like the garden and DIY.
No me time
I was soon feeling that I was doing everything because I had to and nothing because I wanted to. I was the treasurer of my SCUBA diving club. I spent 6 months going to the weekly pool sessions, paying for the pool and collecting fees and then when everyone else went into the pool, I went home. I would have been too late to bed otherwise.
At the next AGM, I gave up the position and with it, the last of my outside interests. Now there just seemed to be more jobs to be done than I could ever possibly do, and I saw more wherever I looked. I was getting more and more tired and I had lost any enthusiasm for anything. By June 2007, I had reached breaking point.
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