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.

Hit the ball....

The MS walk yesterday reminded me of my dad’s old joke about the golfers:
“Wow, Jim, you look exhausted!”
“Yeah – tough golf game yesterday. There we were on the 8th hole and Ralph just drops down – dead – right after he birdies the hole!”
“Oh my god – how horrid!”
“Oh, you don’t know the worst of it. For the rest of the 18, it was: hit the ball, drag Ralph, hit the ball, drag Ralph…”

Overall the walk was a festive event, staffed by volunteers with cheerful faces and happy hearts. The walkers were cheery, too, and when I had to repeatedly step aside to let them go by, especially on the last half, they apologized, encouraged me, said "No, that's okay...".
I was chipper at the start, but as we walked further and further away from the starting point and as I realized how far it would be to get all the way back, my enthusiasm slipped drip by sweaty drip away. By the last 1/4 of the walk I was swearing like a sailor (under my breath) and weaving back and forth like the same sailor on shore leave.
But I made it. Through sheer determination and grit, if I do say so myself. And that was a good thing. I was so helped by my friends who donated so generously and by my walking buddy who caught me as I weaved to the left. Thanks, too, to the ever helpful Mavis (my cane) without whom the whole thing would have been an impossibility.