Ubiquitous.

Is MS the new Hollywood disease?

Tonight on Judging Amy, a woman with multiple sclerosis was in court because the state was trying to remove her child from the home.

I really didn't want to watch this one alone. I really didn't want to watch this one. I want to be a mother. My time to do so is running out. While I cannot really get around the theological ramifications of doing so, I have thought of becoming a single mother myself. Knowing MS would keep me from being a single adoptive parent, I figured the only way was insemination. How do you tell a child that her father was someone you picked out of a book? And how does choosing to have a child by myself via technology fit in with my absolute belief that God is sovereign?

Still, I couldn't help myself. I watched.

And I grew angry. The state wasn't taking her child away because she had MS, but because she was clinically depressed. Now I know that people with MS often suffer from depression, but why did they have to give her MS as well as depression? Not all people with MS are depressed. Many are coping far better than she was doing.

I was angry at the portrayal.

Yet, there was this moment. This moment when the loneliness abated. She described the almost unbearable pain in her feet when she awoke in the mornings. I knew what she was describing. I liken it to standing on knives. I dread putting my feet on the floor because I know how painful it will be. I finally stand and then hobble around until the pain abates.

For a very long while I had thought that I was alone in that symptom, but apparently I am not. Fiction though it may be, there had to be a source for the symptom.

Then, a while ago, I found another person describing the pain in his feet on-line.

Ubiquitous.