How Your Correspondent Took the News

I suspect that many of you, like me, carry around a vision of how your future is likely to unfold. Being an emotionally labile sort, I had two. On sunnier days I anticipated enjoying sterling health into my golden years, happy as a clam, financially secured, maybe a grandchild or two. It seemed likely I'd meet a peaceful end at an advanced age, regretting nothing and surrounded by a multitude of loved ones. On those other days I imagined an untimely and unpleasant demise, broke and alone in a tawdry single occupancy motel on a frontage road outside of Toledo. Such has been my inclination toward extremes. As the years passed and catastrophes remained at bay, I began to trust more in the rosier scenario. My sense of entitlement to a placid old age seemed entirely reasonable. Hadn't I, for the most part, carried my own weight? I'd worked, paid taxes, voted, and on occasion put my shoulder to the collective community wheel. Admittedly, there were legitimate questions regarding my conduct as a younger man, but I mean, fair is fair.

Constitutionally, I'm not well suited to troubling news. My grandmother, "Nanna" as we called her, now there was a gal that could take a punch! I recall as a youngster going into her basement with her to change a fuse. She walked into a low hanging water pipe, POW!. It damn near knocked her out. She staggered back, shook the stars out of her eyes and said, "Danny ...every knock's a boost."

I'm not of that mind. I'm not inclined to see a growth opportunity in bad news. I tend toward pessimism, and, at times I can be grimly fatalistic. For many years I opted not to put more than a couple of dollars worth of gas in my car believing there was a very good chance that something really unpleasant would befall me before I got to use it all. So, I wasn't all that surprised by news of the lesions. I did with this what I've always done with bad news, unpleasantness, and my accumulated myriad of regrets. I banished it to the hinterlands of my psyche. Despite having made my livelihood in the "helping professions," I'm not particularly given to self reflection. I've dodged enough well deserved bullets in my time to believe that Socrates enthusiasm for the investigated life was for those who'd behaved better.

In truth, those lesions weren't causing me a lot of immediate problems and I'd always been an "immediate problem" kind of guy. But, as those familiar with the ubiquitous self help literature can attest, blanket denial has its limits. In retrospect, it appears that my middle aged recycle bin had finally reached capacity and was refusing to contain the megabyte addition represented by news of the lesions. Dread began to leak into my everyday awareness. How, I wondered, would my family and I live if I couldn't work? Was I destined to be parked in the back bedroom strapped into a wheelchair in adult diapers? And who, I wondered, other than those obliged by family connection or a feigned sense of loyalty would want to hang around with some sorry gimp in a wheelchair? I recalled the morbid " Queen for a Day" television show that had fascinated me as a child. I could envision myself tearfully recounting my sad story in hopes of garnering more applause than the other sad sacks and winning the desperately needed washer and dryer. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I began to feel and act as if my life had entered the ninth inning.

When my first line of defense, denial, failed me, I fell back upon my other formidable strength, the capacity for manipulation. I had always been quite successful at conjoling and manipulating my way out of a pickle. Though not a particularly laudable talent, this capacity had served me well. Was there any way, I wondered, that I might weasel my way out of this? Might not some kind of deal be struck, say, copping to a lesser misfortune with a promise to eat my vegetables and to stop sneaking around for a smoke? Perhaps I could unearth a technicality that would compel my doctor to acknowledge his error and rescind the verdict. No hard feelings, I'd graciously assure him, we all make mistakes. The first authoritative medical text I went to suggested there might be some wiggle room. MS, I read, most often strikes in young adulthood and symptoms developing after age forty five are not likely to be MS. Had I known this, I certainly would have pretended that nothing was wrong for an additional couple of years. At forty-seven or forty-eight I would have been on solid scientific footing in appealing my diagnosis to the random and capricious forces at work in the universe. " Guys" I'd say, "far is fair. It's not like I was hiding somewhere. I remained available to be stricken during the agreed upon time frame but you, for reasons of your own, chose not to rain arbitrary misfortune upon me. Now, I don't wish to foist hardship onto others, but there must be some sturdy young adults out there who've not yet shouldered their fair share of misfortune. Perhaps you could satisfy that insatiable blood lust by shaking the earth somewhere in a remote corner of Asia, or maybe, orchestrating a boating mishap somewhere in the North Sea." But as entertaining as I find such flights of fancy they eventually wear thin and lose their capacity to distract.


What the diagnosis, did do, and almost immediately, was throw that assumed rosy future into the hopper. My illness, I was reassured by those trained in the art of reassurance didn't necessarily mean that my future would be any more troublesome than it might have been but it pretty much guaranteed that it would be different.

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