Mad Sow, Mad Cow

Some of you blog readers may wonder why I refer to the blog as "Musings of a Mad Sow". No, I don't think of myself as an angry pig, though, honestly, if I gain any more weight...
No, it's all about Denny Crane on Boston Legal. Right before I was diagnosed, I got hooked on the show, particularly enjoying when Denny would say something completely irrational and then gesture to his head and say, "Mad Cow", as if that explained everything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz0H-Py2rjc&feature=related

One of the signs of MS in me was the loss of the barrier between my interior and exterior monologue. You know, that inner voice that says inside your head, "This guy is a jerk", while on the outside you smile sweetly and say all the right things.
I was in management, so my straight talking almost led to me being escorted off the property
It was quite agonizing, really. I'd realize that my mouth and brain had betrayed me and try to retrieve or patch things up, but often it was simply too late. So, since MS had the right initials, I decided to try to redirect my mouth by pointing to my head and saying "Mad Sow".
Oh how I wish it would work.
For the most part, now that I am less stressed and have slept adequately, my mouth is under better control, but it's not anywhere near perfect. I am much more intolerant of foolishness than I used to be formerly and need to remind myself that being part of any bureaucracy is NOT a good plan. And yet somehow I keep ending up being part of them.
And my mad sow keeps putting her little hooflet in.
Like many of us with invisible disease, my physical symptoms are small - except for numbness and an inability to walk further than a block or so. But the mental ones are glaring, at least to me.
I was "gently reared" as they say, and I cringe at being thought rude. My dad didn't raise me that way. But wherever those lesions nestle, they've liberated my tongue and tied up my Miss Manners. Maybe I need to follow that old African tale and dig a hole and yell my true feelings into it. Maybe then the sow would be appeased.

http://www.documentingreality.com/forum/f2/post-picture-angry-pig-72235/index3.html

Somehow I doubt it.

Grieving

Before I was diagnosed with MS, I was diagnosed with the depression associated with MS. Of course, they didn't know that that was the cause then - they thought it was garden variety depression and I was quite willing to accept that. Trapped in a marriage I was desperate to leave, numbed down to anger, frustration, sorrow, in pain and with weird body symptoms, I thought this was maybe the solution, and I went on and took the suggested antidepressants with hope.

They worked. They kept me from going mad, they gave me the strength to leave my marriage, to change my job, to continue confident although by then my brain was operating at 20-80 capacity, uncorrected.

MS gave more reasons for grief - losing my capacity to work, making poor judgements, financial losses, physical changes I was unable to ignore, and my change from healthy to patient. I handled it all with aplomb, rarely crying, rarely allowing myself to wallow completely until the emotions would be so strong they sent me into suicidal despair. Even then I shook myself off, wiped my slightly weepy eyes, and went on. Movement equaled coping, and as long as I didn't pause, I could think I was coping okay.

Lately, this hasn't been working for me. The numbness of my body, now total, is also matching the numbness in my heart, in my brain. I've developed such high walls around my garden of grieving that I've needed to throw all other emotions in there - joy, love, hate, adoration, belief, everything.

A couple of things have started knocking at the walls. First, my ex has decided to remarry someone who I know deep in my heart is bad for him. I am amazed that I care, and that I am so so angry at him for the way he treated me, still, and for the fact that he has found what he feels is love and I have been unable to. I don't want him back, no no no, but it is galling he has fallen in love with someone so different from myself. And that he grants her things that he denied me, without question.

Second, I lost some people very dear to me lately - a favourite aunt, a sweet uncle. Their deaths made me revisit the deaths of my parents, so long ago, and also ungrieved (see ex, above). They also made me revisit other relationships that haven't gone well, or that I have lost.

Also, a very clever woman asked me yesterday about my "well-guarded" status - and asked about grieving about the MS. Of course I started draining like a leaky faucet right there and then. Yes, I am totally guarded, that's my problem, and the thing about MS is that you have new reasons to grieve every day. Little losses, little gains that are illusory, little hopes that get crushed, and now little fears that grow up in their place. I've spent so much time pretending I am okay, with everything, that I almost believe it, but not really. I joke about losing my sensation, my continence, my balance, my ability to stand. But it isn't really funny and perhaps I just need to do some private grieving and let it go.

Maybe I'm like Yellowstone, that huge volcano in the middle of the US. If it were capped, it would build up pressure and explode, rupturing most of the US and destroying all about it. But it lets off steam, all the time, through Ol' Faithful and various other geysers and little leakages, so it will likely not explode. Maybe I should let go slowly, rather than slapping on a lid and a smile, joking my way as I fall apart.

Numbness

The numbness of MS is an odd thing - I can still move, still (mostly) organize my limbs to head to their appointed places, although the leg numbness is a more functional lack. I feel mentally numb, too, buffered from life, insulated from things. Part of it is most likely a self-preservation response to a life crisis - I know my crisis isn't as bad as some have, but it is a total annihilation for me, in so many ways. My world map has changed irretrievably and I'm lost. It would be terrifying if I allowed myself to feel it fully.
I'll have to peel off the layers of mental and emotional numbness, but it isn't easy. It involves grieving, and feeling totally shitty for hours and having eyeballs puffed up and leaky. It also involves physical activity, one of the things that makes me more aware of my physical space, my body, my self. That's not going to be easy, either, with a body that thinks walking across the room is quite enough for one day, thanks.
Had a talk with a good friend last night, who, although he has his own issues, also sees mine with unusual clarity. He laid some home truths on me, as it were, and my head is spinning.
But I'm bored with myself, bored with self-analysis. I don't want to look anymore into the pit that once was me. Usually, when I feel this way, I do something, anything, to end the numbness and distract myself from it - eat fudge, drink wine, take a man to bed. This time, I'm going to use the numbness as a tool, to guide me, and write my boredom with myself out.