Loss of Independence

by Marcus I. Brown

Brown Publishing Group

Reading stories about prisoners of war I can imagine that this chapter of their lives must have been a difficult and challenging time.
When I  think about a POW in a war I often think about the fact that the person is confined and can't move about like they want to. They are in a strange and unknown place. Often the biggest toll that it takes on the person is the mental one.
I have never been a POW and so I am not writing from firsthand experience. I have read accounts of prisoners of war and I seek to draw parallels between the prisoner of war experience and a person who has MS.
One thing that I learned from the prisoner of war stories, the Diary of Anne Frank, survivors of the Holocaust and stories about slavery is survival and quality of life is about a state of mind. It isn't so much the physical torture or abuse that they endured, but mental torture.
Smart captors know that and they try to get in the prisoner's head. Multiple Sclerosis is much the same way. I often say that unlike a congenital disease where a person is born without sight, hearing or one of the other senses, Multiple Sclerosis robs a person of abilities that they had. The disease inflicts the cruelest kind of torture; loss of independence that the person had before.
My story begins ten years ago when my sons were kids and I would play with them in the backyard. We played football. My sons against dad. I noticed that I couldn't "cut" or change direction quickly when I was running with the football. I went to the doctor and he said, "It's nothing...a lot of people who are are in their forties have that problem." I knew that NONE of my friends have that issue. He sent me to a cardiologist. Total waste of money!
I thought that it was vertigo. Meanwhile Multiple Sclerosis was slowly taking my independence. Like a thief in the night, it was quiet and invisible. Unlike a prisoner of war there wasn't any torture. There were questions though. These questions didn't come from a captor. They came from me.
"Why was this happening to me?" The next torture technique occurred while I was walking around the neighborhood with my friend. We usually walked three times a week throughout the neighborhood. We would walk on the sidewalk side by side. I kept veering onto his side one day and he said, "Man, you'd better have that checked out!"
The final torture technique happened when I went hot tubbing with a friend of mine one weekend. The heat beat me down and I literally had to be helped out of the hot tub and to the car. I still hadn't been diagnosed so these were unrelated incidents in my mind. I was slowly being robbed... Robbed of my independence. I didn't even realize it at the time.
I went to a different doctor this time. I "fired" the other doctor. The new doctor said he was going to order a MRI. I saw a neurologist at the same clinic and she said that the results of my MRI pointed to several different diseases and the only way they would know for sure is that I have a lumber puncture or spinal tap.
I still haven't been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, but the thief is in my body! In all of movies that I've seen where they held Prisoners of war, the captor would gradually deprive the prisoner of certain things like light, food and clothing. Multiple Sclerosis is a lot like a captor. It can deprive you of light (optic neuritis), food (loss of appetite) and clothing (heat or cold intolerance).
At the same time that I was having the MRI and the lumbar puncture I was going through another kind of torture. I was going through a divorce. That's another story altogether! I said that to say that I didn't have health insurance when I got the lumbar puncture and the procedure was done gratis by a neurologist in Sugar Land, TX.
I was finally diagnosed April 15, 2010. I began another chapter of my life...