PENDING

If I was a filing tray in the medical world that would be my label.  Or my contents would be.  And what am I hanging around for? In short;  following the cancellation of my appointment with the consultant at the beginning of the year, I contacted the MS nurse.  I’m a bit slow on the uptake but I now realise that only one problem can be tackled per appointment, but through persistence I managed to log with her the issues I needed to raise.  So, she has pushed me off her desk and I now sit in the pending tray of the Occupational Therapist, the Physiotherapist, and scanning departments various.  The Occupational Therapist gave me online swallowing lessons(!) the Physio’ could only manage “pain in the neck” which is how my query to the MS nurse re shooting pains up into my head to the back of my eyes was translated.  The total uselessness of my right side seems to have been forgotten but apparently I’m getting another appointment with another OT regarding my arm.

Oh! And there are Vitamin B12 injections on the way.  Apparently*.  

You may remember that the Consultant I saw in the clinic in Blackheath in 2018 prescribed some steroids which he asked me to try, and then report back to him as to their efficacy.  Having just had a rotten couple of weeks I thought I’d resort to the steroids, which were out of date.   I am sure it would make no difference but on the basis it was something of an experiment I thought it would be best to use something that was fully potent.   So I fixed a telephone appointment with my GP to see if she could renew the ‘script’.  Which, it turned out, she couldn’t do.  So I telephoned the consultant’s secretary for another appointment to get the script renewed.  The appointment was yesterday and, hurrah, the script is on its way either by post or email to the GP’s surgery.  Also Mr Silber has prescribed Baclofen which apparently helps with muscle stiffness, which, I have been advised, may go too far the other way and make the muscles too ‘floppy’ to use.    But at least I’m out of his pending tray for a few weeks and I feel somebody has done something helpful.  It may not be useful but at least somebody in the medical world is helping me.

As to my physical state:  If my left side was as affected as my right I would be completely scuppered.  My left drags my right side around and has to do everything.  So far, so good, except for writing, knife use or spooning food into my mouth.  But I can still pass the spaghetti challenge**!  Buttons and zips, hooks and eyes I can just about manage.  Thank God for the dictation facility on my phone or iPad.  Luckily, my signature has always looked like something between a squashed spider and an ink blot so, as yet, it’s not an issue.   I am trying to be one step ahead of this monster, but it is not easy.  

*They start today – it’s 3 or 4 days since I wrote the above.

**  twirling the pasta onto a fork.  That movement using the thumb and first and second fingers.  I can twizzle left handed!