Unholy MS » symptoms

Symptoms, before

Millicent — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 17:04:28 +0000

Needing to document what’s up with me before venoplasty, here is as good a place as any. Here we go, stuff that affects me daily, weekly, monthly:

Fatigue

Chronic pain: lower back, arms, neck, shoulder, headache

Numbness: right arm and hand, both legs

Cold hands (mostly rt hand)

Zingers, burning, pins, tingling: both arms, rt shoulder, rt hand, neck, rt leg

Weakness: rt leg, rt hand — difficulty grasping and holding onto objects, frequently dropping things

Whooshing sound inside my head or in my ears — usually when I first get up in the morning

Purple foot (rt side)

Optic neuritis currently resolving rt eye

Floaters in vision (mostly left eye)

Bladder (urgency, frequency, retention)

No dreams

Emotional lability

Loss of sense of taste/smell

Loss of interest in food

Insomnia

Clicking/popping/pain in neck (mostly rt side)

Motion sickness (severe)

Poor coordination

Frequent falls

Knee buckles (rt knee, what a shock)

Sensitivity to heat/humidity

Muscle spasms (mostly rt leg)

Some cog fog/memory problems

Tinnitus

Other things that might be related? Whiplash injury at age 16, TMJ, TOS

In addition, I have developed a sensitivity to hydrocodone, so painkillers like Vicodin or Norco don’t work for me (unless you consider barfing each morning to be okey-dokey. Me, I couldn’t handle it). Neurontin is somewhat helpful for zingers, but it’s also the brain-destroyer that makes me stoopid. And I’m tired of herbal meds that are only somewhat helpful. It’s all a giant clusterfuck.

I know you mean well…

Millicent — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 22:47:37 +0000

…but just shut up about how I’ve lost weight, okay? You wanna know my secret? I’ve lost my sense of taste and smell. Yep, that will make a gal lose interest in food pretty darn quick. So even though we live in this culture that says that all weight loss is automatically good, every time, no matter what, that’s not actually true.

I’d gladly weigh more if it meant I could taste my food.

Balance, a tricky thing

Millicent — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:52:47 +0000

I have numb hands, mostly the right one. And I am right-handed. It makes typing difficult, and it also means that I drop things. A lot. I can’t even begin to count all the things I’ve dropped, but here are some samples:

Dishes (of all kinds: cups, plates, bowls, you name it; we’re mostly a plastic dishware house now)
Glass bottles (oh Pellegrino, it makes me so sad when I drop your glass bottles and they shatter into a million pieces)
Things at the grocery store (apples seem to be especially tricksy — I drop them, they roll away, never to be seen again)
Other miscellaneous whatever (newspapers, which flutter open so that their multiple pages are all separate. That’s awesome; toys, which make noises as if they’re shocked, shocked to be dropped on the floor; clothes, which is annoying when it’s a bra and I drop it into the bathroom sink and it gets all wet. Not that I’ve ever done that, ahem; cat food, which makes a delightful tuna fish smell that lingers all day; the list goes on and on)

And walking can be fraught with interesting challenges. So far, I am mostly mobile, and very happy that thus far, my MS hasn’t limited my walking. But I am wobbly, and my right knee buckles under me with some regularity. It’s fun to try to explain to people why you’ve fallen; I’ve mostly given up and if they think I’m drunk, well, them’s the breaks.

Do you fall? Drop things? Have you developed ways to accommodate your disability? Do you use a wheelchair? Or a cane? Do people treat you differently because of it? I want to hear all about it in the comments.