This has been a most challenging day.

I was awake most of last night for the fourth night in a row because of my coughing--the reason I broke down and visited the doctor. I thought that once I started taking some medicine, I would get better. I am not.

The antibiotic is making my stomach cramp with sharp pains, that is to say that it cramps when it is not otherwise being nauseous. The pain is quite sharp and quite distinct from the uterine cramps I am having just now as well. And, of course, the stomach cramps and the uterine cramps are quite different from the chest pain I am having from the coughs rattling my bronchial tubes. No, I am not feeling much better.

It did not help that I finally got a call from the temp agency. I knew that when a call did not come by the end of yesterday I did not get the job, so the news today was no surprise. Still, I could not have felt lower. Five different questioning sessions for a clerical job, and I am am found wanting.

A friend called soon there after, while I was writing my own reference letters. Two people had offered to serve as references for me, but when the time came to write, they passed the pen. I have been struggling how to say anything positive about myself and then write in such a way that the recipient of both will not suspect that the applicant was the one who actually wrote them. But, perhaps, a wee bit of sunshine will break through the clouds and both references will decide to edit the letters I sent for their signatures.

Needless to say, when T called I was sniveling as I typed. She was traveling between cities and called to chat as I prefer to do myself, so I tried to stifle my tears and listen to her. I will say this, she gave me a gift of honesty that both assuaged and fomented my fears all at once.

During the course of the phone call, she remarked at how much she hated my family for failing to acknowledge my illness, treating me more as if I had made it all up instead of opening their eyes and ears to see the devastating toll multiple sclerosis has already taken upon me. No, I am not yet in a wheelchair. Yes, I am still independent. The toll of which she lamented, however, was the changes wrought in my mind. As she put it, I am not the person I was back when I was standing before her in the college classroom.

I, myself, descry the changes. And here I have lamented that when I do so, I am mostly belittled by responses such as, "Oh, I forget things, too." My quick, somewhat bitter response these days: "Really, tell me just one time when you did not know your name or when you forgot how to form the letter 'h'?" I feel as if I am screaming and no one is listening...and that by the time anyone listens, there will be no more of me left. Yet, here she was bluntly referring to that which I fear. "You have trouble following conversations; you repeat yourself; you cannot access words. You are not the person you were ten years ago."

She is right. I am no longer the intellectual whiz who never had to prep for any of the college courses she taught because she had hundreds of books and authors and theories and research studies in literacy at the tip of her tongue. I am not that person. That saddens me.

Yet, it is not that I am wallowing in what I have lost. It is that I cannot help, from time to time, to step outside myself and compare the woman I was then to the one I am today. What is even more frightening is comparing who I was just three years ago and who I am now.

That she would mention this in passing thrilled me because in that moment I felt as if I were not completely alone. That she would mention this in passing devastated me because it is a reality that cannot be denied.

When she was speaking, I suddenly remembered the first time I knew that something was wrong. The first time I was confused happened in the last semester of teaching while I was completing my Ph.D. I was late for class and raced from the car, up the stairs, and down the hall hoping that I had beat at least some of my students to the room, all the while lugging about thirty children's books in three bags. When I turned the corner to find that the second corridor was as empty as the one through which I had just passed, my hopes sunk as I realized that I would most likely be the last one to arrive. Imagine my surprise when I realized that I was alone in the room. I stuck my head out in the hall and looked up and down the corridor. No one. After getting all my books set out in the order I would need for my lecture, I ventured out to find out where everyone was. I began thinking that there had been some sort of college holiday that had been declared when I was off campus. I finally tracked down a student, one of my own. I will never forget the look on his face when I asked why he wasn't in class. I had the wrong day.

Oh, you say, I have gotten up for work on a Saturday, dressed and drank the coffee before realizing I could have slept in. I would retort that I certainly took it further that day. Yet, while that was the first time I became lost in my own world, it was not the time I knew that something was happening to my mind.

It was over a year later. My class was being held in the college library. A library with only two floors. When my lecture was over, I walked with some of my students who had lingering questions about what I had covered that day. We all stepped into the elevator and they waited for me to push the button since I was nearest the panel. There were only two buttons. I stared at the panel, knowing I was supposed to do something and yet not understanding which one would take us all up to the main floor. "Push it," someone called, but I remained still, trapped in absolute confusion. Finally, a student reached around me and blithely pushed the one we needed. While I garnered a few quizzical looks, I am fairly confident that not a one of my students realized that that was the day I knew my life had changed forever September 13, 1994.

I was checking out of the neurologist's office when that blasted woman was called to the counter where I stood. One of her staff held out a message for her. She took the slip of paper, scanned it, and then asked for a prescription pad. As she scrawled out something for another patient, she said to me, without taking her eyes from the pad. "I believe I mentioned the possibility of you having multiple sclerosis?"

"No," I replied, somewhat confused.

"Well, you do." With that pronouncement, she turned and walked back to the exam room area. It was not until several years later that I understood the ramifications of her diagnosis. T's comment brought that moment in the elevator flooding back into my mind.

Maybe part of my desire to flee this city to a quieter life such as in Appleton is because I feel the toll of remaining here is too great a cost. Stress exacerbates the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. If I were to find a life I hope is waiting out there for me somewhere, would I gain some time?

It is my hope.

I will finish by writing that I worked on my novel some this evening, after battling over this current chapter for many days. However, I felt like the greatest hypocrite once I read the words that emerged from my finger tips.


“Do you want me to go in with you?”

Megan shook her head. “Go to Alfred’s. I’ll come when I am finished.”

Graham reached out and pried one of Megan’s hands off her purse to take it in his own. “In John, I just read where Jesus told something to his followers that I thought you might like to hear.” At Megan’s look of confusion, he dared continue. “I don’t get half of what he means, talking about his spirit and leaving and preparing things. But I memorized those words because it sounded like he was really speaking to me, even though I do not understand how that could possibly be.” Graham stepped closer and whispered in Megan’s ear, “‘Peace I leave you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, do I give you. Let not your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.’” Quickly, he kissed the top of her head and turned toward the mercantile, steeling himself to not look back so that his wife could visit the doctor on her own resolve as she had wished. Knowing her fears, knowing her pain, it was the hardest thing he had ever done in his entire life.


Perhaps I wrote of peace because I long for its rest in my own life....