A Helpful Book

As a youngish and dating woman with MS, one of the things that has filled me with the most despair over the past several years is my loss of sensation in the...ahem...sexual areas. I consulted with my docs, whose recommendation was to place a bag of frozen peas over the...ahem...area in question and that that would help me feel increased sensation.
Well, I dunno about you guys, but frozen anything DOWN there doesn't sound too enchanting for me or the fellah involved. As one friend said, it's like going swimming in the Atlantic Ocean - cold at first, but okay once you're in...
Yikes.
Now, other than developing a jaundiced eye whenever I see a bag of frozen peas in the market, I haven't had much success with that advice. A friend of mine (who works with people with disabilities and their sexual health) and I got to talking. What if we combined the power of her knowledge of everything sexual and battery operated, and my nursing knowledge and the experience of someone living with MS, and we put together a helpful book?
Not a deadly boring one, but a light, useful one, with advice and drawings and some laughter and fun. That. we figured, could be a help to other people like me.
After all, MS is being diagnosed earlier and earlier, and it sounds gruesome to be sentenced to years and years without any idea of how to have a rewarding sex life. We deserve one, no?

But maybe that isn't what's needed. So we thought we'd ask you. In a short little survey, with no chance we can identify you, compiled on machines somewhere in the deep dungeons of the internet, impossible to trace. Well, maybe not completely impossible to trace, but I've got better things to do than find you. There are all those other frozen veggies to experiment with...

Here's the Blurb:

Dorothyanne Brown, a person with MS, nurse, and epidemiologist, and her
writing partner Karen Kalinowski, a Natural Health Consultant and Sex and Kink Awareness Educator, are collaborating to create a resource for people with MS and their partners about sexual intimacy. 

We've created a short survey, ten questions, to get a feeling for what your
needs are as a person with MS or a partner of a person with MS.

The survey is completely anonymous. We have no way to figure out who answers
it, we plan no cross linkage to any database or physician services. 

It will help us create a resource that will be most useful to you. 

Just click on this link and you will be taken to the survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LSLN9XN

Please share widely with others with MS or their partners. Help us create a resource that will work for you.
Questions? respond here or email msandintimacy@gmail.com
And thanks!

MS and lust, lethargy and lipgloss

Okay, I'll admit it.  I'm a fifty-one year old who has rediscovered the joys of lust after a long marriage where sex was the only medium used to indicate displeasure (unfortunately, ex didn't get that message). Let's just say it was a bit sparse near the end, say the last five years or so. (or 10)

One of the best best things about leaving my marriage was meeting a lovely man that taught me that it wasn't ME that couldn't respond, didn't like touch, etc.  It was the situation that cooled me off. I was overwhelmed with joy and sensation and still love the guy, years later, though he is no longer part of my life.

So I find it terribly unfair that MS has sucked away my sensations in certain, ahem, key areas. Not that it has slowed me down. I argue to my friends that I am so fatigued from the MS that there comes a point on a date where it is just easier to lie down and do something that doesn't require much chat. It passes the time, remains fun, provides physical activity, I don't have to be witty, and the men seem to like it.

It's a bit dangerous, though, as it becomes my fallback position (as it were) when I am tired at the end of the evening. When I was dating more, I'd go out for dinner, say, go for a walk, wander about, then feel, really, I HAD to lie down right away.  Y'all with MS know this feeling.

The men - well, they were only too happy to keep me company. Add to that my main sensations left are located in my lips, and after a few kisses, well, life became rather scandalous pretty quickly.

But, I reasoned, if I don't use it, I might lose it. And, like eating chocolate when I knew diabetes was pending, I felt I should pack in as much as I could before the boom fell and I wouldn't be able to enjoy it any more. Well, they do say MS impairs some cognitive functions, too...

Alas, even using it hasn't helped me not lose it. MS marches on, and now I am a seriously lascivious woman trapped in a body with seriously impaired sensation. I tried to tell my neuro about it and had to revisit it a lot before he (always he, always he) would listen.  I'll just bet if I'd been a man and told him I couldn't get it up, he'd have been all over it with ideas.  But it remains that women lacking sensation is still deemed rather unimportant, despite so many studies talking about how sexuality is essential for intimate relationships, self-esteem, bonding, etc.

I'm still interested, and thank heavens I am in a relationship now with a kind, loving man who seems willing to explore options, but the fact remains there are times when I can't feel him touch me. And no matter how aroused my mind may be, if I can't sense his touch, my body doesn't respond. It's frustrating. I miss that thrill of neurons firing up and down my spine and tickling my lust centre. I miss the feeling of an aroused body. I miss the increasing heartbeat, the warmth speeding to the skin, the hairs raising. It often doesn't happen, and it's definitely not his fault.

It's tempting to give up, but I've never been a quitter...and I'm not quite ready to retreat to memories of my explorations.
But I've had to give up chocolate.
Unfair.

But what about sex?

Woke this morning thinking about love and lust and all those things that make the world go 'round and the birds sing their throats out in my backyard. And got to chuckling about what the MS clinic had to say about it all. I told them that I was lacking sensation, and that as a young 50 gal, this was leading me to some frustration...
So, here was their suggestion. "Some people find that if they put a bag of frozen peas on the area for a few minutes beforehand (as it were), the sensation gets better..."
OMG. So, so here you are, in amongst the awkwardness of dating sex, where you are trying to undress without revealing too many stretch marks or that unwise tattoo or the fungal toenail or whatever body imperfection is playing with your head that day (I remember obsessing for a week about my short toes, for example), AND you are trying to get socks off without bending into an unattractive pretzel, all the while trying to keep the sexual tension high because let's face it, over 50 guys need that....
And now you are supposed to excuse yourself for a minute, race to the freezer, and put frozen food on your groin, all while "maintaining the moment"?
The mind boggles.

Hmm. Maybe Cool Whip.....