And a New Life begins!

Dawn of a new day has come, a new day filled with new prayers, with the anxiety of  a fresh thought and outlook that now i am a girl with MS, where everything seems so different in a different way.

I woke up with anxiety. I hate injections, and the thought of getting IV was getting on my nerves. I still get jittery when I think of getting an injection. I find it very painful, like I said earlier, I am a sensitive girl. So I went to the hospital with my mom, brother and father.  There was no room available so had to wait, at that time I was numb looking over all the people around me, I realized all emotions can be witnessed at the hospital; sadness, happiness, anger , despair, excitement. When I look at myself I was confused. I thought of myself as a perfectly normal girl; walking and talking and eating, but was at a hospital getting steroids for a Multiple Sclerosis episode. The irony of this disease is that we look fine to everyone, no one would know unless told that we have a problem, it is only when the disease worsens that it is visible to the world.

Lying at the hospital bed, still the eye was partially blind, and by that day it got worse. So many thoughts were coming to my mind, like what to tell my pregnant sister who was waiting for me to come and stay with her, she didn’t know I was diagnosed with MS at that time. We decided to tell her when she comes to India on my wedding which was planned to be held in DECEMBER 2013. Her delivery date was around November, I was too scared to tell her as she was 6 months pregnant.  She already went through a tough time with pregnancy. I knew it was wrong to not share this with her, but I was more worried about her and her baby. She was at a delicate part of her life. I didn’t want to hamper it in anyway. One by one my friends & family came to see me, everyone asked what had happened and at that time I didn’t say I had MS. I said it was optic neuritis. No one knew what MS was at that moment, and I myself didn’t know properly, so how could I have explained to anybody what it was. Get well soon! You will be fine! So many flowers and cakes I received, and to be frank, I was enjoying the attention….He He!!Another thing that kept coming to my mind, as days passed by in the hospital bed was that every time someone said get well soon, I wondered, how long will it take to get well?? My eye sight might not come back, and what about the lesions? There is no cure for the lesions. So get well soon, didn’t mean much at that time.  After three days of steroids, the black spot was better, and that made me feel relieved. I prayed a lot in the hospital and my friends and family also prayed with me. But the same thought kept ringing, even if I can see; I still have a disease I have to live with. This thought never failed to shake my hopes and beliefs.

One day at the hospital, my fiance (now husband) talked to me about the disease and our future. All I remember was “no matter what happens in the future, I will always be there by your side to support you. You do not need to worry about anything else” and those lines are still alive in my life.  That support love and care has increased with each passing day. My in-laws have really taken care of me too. After five days in the hospital I came back home with a clearer vision, but the future as an MS patient was not clear.

Just as Daisaku Ikeda says, I quote “Prayer is hope. It is the dawn of life. It sows the seeds of happiness. Those who challenge the future with prayer are sure to see improvement in their lives”.

So every day I pray to live with a hope of a good day today and a better day tomorrow.

I would like to express a bit more about myself and why I started this blog as a means to share my thoughts and experiences with people who don’t know what MS is and how does it affect a person?

 I have started this blog where I share my story after I was diagnosed with MS in the year 2013. The 1^st few blogs are about my diagnosis and then the struggle to understand the disease which leads to accepting it and living with it happily, and how I cope with it on a daily basis. I have had two episodes till now; I still have trouble with my left leg. I live in India, where the exposure to the disease is not too much. Usually no one shares about the disease and I am trying to create awareness about this debilitating disease through my life experiences and to get all the patients together, where we support each other and live a life of hope and ‘Making the Sunshine’ together.

MS currently affects about 2.5 million people in the world. MS is an auto immune disorder where the body’s natural immune system mistakenly attacks healthy body tissue. Your physical and mental functions are normally controlled through the signals transmitted from the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) to other parts of your body. However, with MS these signals can become interrupted causing a wide range of symptoms. Not all people have all these symptoms; it varies from person to person.

Some common symptoms are: Blurred vision, problem with concentration, tingling, numbness, muscle stiffness, bowel and bladder problems, fatigue, weakness, poor balance and trouble walking, spasticity, emotional changes and depression.

You can read more about it by opening this link: http://www.nationalmssociety.org/Symptoms-Diagnosis/MS-Symptoms

Being aware of these symptoms is important.  We should not be scared to talk about it with our friends and family and we should not take the symptoms lightly.