My Story |
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I started my story on my living with multiple sclerosis page, and found that I was starting to blog. Since I drifted off of the MS topic, I thought that if I am to share my story, ideas, and reflections that I should put the words on another page. Thus the creation of this page...to continue my story, my reflections, my frustrations, my hopes, dreams....parts of me. Update Sept 2010:It is amazing how much can change in a year and a half. I read my post from Feb. 2009 and it is humbling to be where I am now. What's changed? I am now unemployed. All 4 jobs have gone "poof"! But that is OK because as Pete says, I am going to reinvent myself. December 29ish 2009 I woke up dizzy. It was fairly consistent through March 2010 so I decided it was time for me to leave the classroom. Thinking it was daily activity that was causing the dizziness symptoms, I expected it to clear up once summer started. Nope. It is better and it is mainly a balance issue more than room spins, but it is still not as subtle as I would like it to be. I can drive, but I still do it judiciously and do not go long distances. Walking, now that is another challenge. I started using a rollator around August 2008. I did not need it daily, but if I knew I was going some distance or was carrying things, I used it. A rollator is a walker with wheels. But it is more than a walker! And I still have my teeth so don't call it a walker to me. In January 2010 when the dizziness prevented me from driving, I started commuting on public transit with the walker. Eventually I need to find where I was blogging about public transit to share some more stories. If I can't find that space, I'll just have to make a page here. I commuted for the most part on public transit daily to school from Jan to April 2010. I am taking classes online to help me learn more about being an online teacher. I am hoping to get a job where I am an online high school teacher. I've been told I'm hired, but I have yet to be placed with students. Oh well, I'll spend my time working on my courses. I took 2 online courses summer 2010 and found them to be fantastic. I learned so much about the Internet and all that it offers. Now I want to take classes on how to build websites so that I can make my websites even better than they are. I'm trying to launch www.rentwebname.com, but am failing miserably. So for fall 2010 I am taking a third class on how to use Moodle (the 2 summer classes were also using Moodle) and a class on SQL. I like both and both are sufficiently challenging. I am doing the SQL class because I want to learn database management. I know I can figure out a way to create the ultimate grading program. I just need to learn how to program. Well, as much as I love to write about myself, I'd rather take time today to upload the images from the MRI that I had last week. You'll have to check out my brain pics from 2010 to see if you can figure out if things are better or not. I can't tell. I still see lots of small dots- that is the MS in action. The point of this MRI was to see if there was any obvious clue about why I'm dizzy. I'm still clue-minus on that one, but if when I see the neurologist next week she has a clue, I'll be sure to share. Update Feb. 2009:I'm updating this on Feb. 21, 2009 to say that life is good. I have 4 part-time jobs. My business still exists. I get to teach 1 section of biotechnology at a really amazing school. I have a temporary internship with a nanotechnology company. And 3 evenings a week I tutor local high school students. No complaints about my career. The evil people who poisoned my happiness no longer talk to me. It is unfortunate that one of them is in a position of power and therefore can still affect my career, but I believe that what goes around, comes around, and she will have created her own demons that will fight on my behalf in due time. I am happily married. My husband takes great care of me. He loves me and I love him. It is kind of neat that our marriage works that way. I get head pins as often as I need to. My acupuncture doctors are among the best there are. I am very fortunate to live close enough to Zhu's Acupuncture Center that I can go when needed. Life is really crazy at the moment so I don't have much I can say that rambles or is full of bitterness. I am very fortunate to have a career full of diverse opportunities. My life is good. Links to MS related pages at this site: Links to other MS websites Link to my business, Online School Surveys Something I can do from bed to earn some income. Check it out and have your school hire me :-) |
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Older posts from pages I used to have here: Multiple Sclerosis is the reason I have the time at the age of 36 to be sitting on my backside creating this website. You see, life is grand as long as I don't do much of anything that involves a significant amount of energy. I retired from teaching at the age of 33. Woohoo! Most would be jealous, but don't be. So one of my challenges that I am trying to learn how to embrace is living with the unpredictability of dealing with MS symptoms. Actually, as time goes on, I can kind of anticipate when I'm going to get an exacerbation. An exacerbation is when the process of making scar tissue in my brain or spinal cord becomes excessive and I can actually feel symptoms from it. In time, I will be linking to pictures of my brain from here. If nothing else, the teachers who visit this site may be able to use the photos to show their students what a brain looks like, and what one with scar tissue in it looks like. It is absolutely fascinating. When I was first diagnosed, at the age of 28, I kept knowledge that I had a disease from as many people as I could. I had been raised to not be proud of having a disease. Since my father died when I was little, from cancer, my family had gotten over the "C" word, but other diseases just were not accepted. After all, at 28 years old, I'm supposed to be creating my career, meeting my future partner, having fun, making friends...not having MRI's, blood tests, and blind spots in my vision. Sadly I was fortunate to have a student who had to go on Methyltrexate (is that the right spelling???) for her juvenile arthritis. Because of her strength I found strength to push myself to keep teaching. Ultimately her inspiration was not enough to keep me being able to work full time. Eventually I could not even work part-time if that involved working daily. I have the wrong personality to have a chronic disease. I don't know anyone who has the right personality, but I know I don't. One "flaw" of my personality is wanting to help people. One reason I quit graduate school was because I did not feel like I was helping anyone. Fortunately when I started teaching, I "found" where I am supposed to be. I'm supposed to torture students, make them think, give them opportunities to make a mess, and encourage them to believe in themselves. But the way our society is set up, I'd have to work every day. Imagine that! And when I do something every day, outside of my home that requires thought or concentrated energy, my body gets bitchy and something goes berserk. When all it was was my leg that started to drag, I was fine. So I learned how to deal with life looking young and using a cane. But last spring, my body did not choose to "punish" me by tightening up my leg like it had been doing for the last few years. NOOOO, that was too easy. I could still drive. I could still teach. I could still work or at least do something every day when all that happened was my leg dragging. Nope, this time the scar tissue targeted my vision. Now when I do too much, I can't track. When I can't track, I can't drive. When I can't drive, working is more difficult, buying groceries is an adventure, and even maintaining my sanity is a challenge. Most recently I started working part-time with student teachers. The aspiring new teachers I work with are wonderful, optimistic, and intelligent people. I enjoy pursuing questions about how to teach this or that, or how to work with a student that does this or that. Unfortunately, however, my idiotic body does not like me working even this much, part-time. Oh, I work maybe a few hours a day 3 or 4 days a week. But apparently that is still too many hours not spent sleeping. So how did it let me know that I'm doing too much? Well, I now have the joy of using a plastic tube to remove urine from my bladder. Yep, I have to catheterize myself so I can pee. Otherwise I'll do damage to my kidneys, and can't let that happen, now can I? One good thing to note is that the self-catheterization is a temporary solution as long as I have acupuncture. I can usually pee without assistance within 5 days of having had acupuncture. Because this is too narrow of a window for me, I will be quitting my current part-time job. I want to go back to how things were during the summer where peeing was not necessarily a cognitive experience.
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