Office spoons

There's a cute little analogy that goes around about how to pace yourself with MS. It for some reason equates your energy to spoons - every day you start off with the same number of spoons, and you use them up throughout the day - getting dressed is a spoon, making breakfast is a spoon, going to get groceries is five spoons, and so on. Once the spoons are gone, you have to wait til they come back.

So if you plan ahead, you can have your cake and eat it to, so to speak. You just make sure there are enough spoons left to do what you want in the day.

Aha. One problem. With MS, our drawerful of spoons is like the drawer of spoons in the office. You know, the one that one day can barely close because of all the spoons, and the next day has only one bent one in the corner, and for some reason, a pickle fork.

With MS, there's a secret someone taking away and adding spoons. So, though we may think we can do this and that when we wake up, we may go to the drawer and find our expectations have to dramatically change. We have to adapt, every day, to what we find in that drawer.

It's hard to explain this to people without MS (PWOMS). But most people understand about those office spoons.