It’s been a rough couple of days up in here in the land of BBAD. I feel like way too many of my posts start with those words lately but it’s just the truth even if it is rather redundant.

It rained really badly on Sunday going into Monday. Old Me (OM for short) loved the rain. The sound of it, the look it, the smell of it, the feel of it; OM loved everything about a good rainy day. New Me (NM for short) still loves all of those things about the rain but not so much the weird stuff that happens to my body when a gentle rain decides to fall.

You know the kinds of things I’m talking about. Spasticity goes off the charts. I mean, even with high doses of two different muscle relaxers and 400 units of Botox my body, my legs specifically just don’t move well when the rain begins to fall. Or move much at all, really. Pain radiates from various joints and muscles and no amount of stretching or pain medications or weed can touch it. You feel like you’re slogging through wet cement, to use yet another over-used analogy for a bad MS body day.

I lack adequate words to describe the utter frustration one feels when standing anywhere at all trying to move from one place to another and your brain is telling your foot to move but your foot stays stuck to the floor like it has been slathered in super glue.

It just will not move. No matter how hard you will it to move, it stays stuck in its place as if moving were the most foreign concept in the world. As if it had never moved before. Like moving is something completely unknown to this foot. This foot has been in this spot and will stay in this spot forever and ever and who cares how much you have to pee? Foot refuses to move. Tears well up and shoot from your eyes against your will. You cannot control them. Those tears are the boss of you. Your feet are laughing at you and you still have to figure out how to function even in this bubble we call home.

That’s how this week started.

Yesterday the rain broke and the sun came out to play in the most gorgeous, cool temperatures the likes of which fall in the northeast United States has never seen before. The weather was the kind of gorgeous fall day that pumpkin spice lattes and Ugg boots were made for (and I only like one of those things…you can guess which one). It was glorious. This was the kind of weather I longed for in those last ninety degree humid days of September. The kind of weather that should make my body behave more like a MS riddled body should. This is the weather I’ve been waiting for! Hooray for fall! Momma’s going outside.

Or not.

Because my feet? My feet didn’t get the memo. They were still stubbornly stuck to the floor. They dragged a bit more? But they weren’t lifting off of the floor much at all. I was having a hard time remaining vertical because my body kept wanting to bend over at the waist.

Have you ever felt that weird sensation when your body is struggling to remain vertical for longer than a few seconds? The one where you wedge yourself toward the sink while washing your face because you’re about to go face first into porcelain? The feeling when you can’t look down without folding in half. That’s the feeling I’m trying to explain here. I’m not sure if it’s weakness so much as it is the feeling like your body has given up on you forever. You have no control over it. It will do as it pleases and it pleases to fold in half. Thankyouverymuch.

I felt a tad better today than I did on Monday but nowhere near outside world ready. I had to content myself with watching the pretty weather from my living room while working and taking calls between stumble drag trips to the bathroom. It was soul crushing. This was supposed to be my weather goddammit! What is wrong with this ridiculous body?!? (Well, for one thing, it has aggressive progressive MS you idiot, but details.)

I remembered vaguely waking up in the middle of the night to (you guessed it!) pee, and absently thinking about how my feet were moving better. They weren’t dragging on the bathroom rugs like they did the night before. I felt slightly more strong while vertical. I had a fleeting notion that I should get up right then and there and go outside and walk to my car (with Clara my fancy Danish rollator of course) and take a top-down drive before my body remembered that it was broken like that record album you smashed on the table into a thousand pieces because it had that song on it, you know the one, that one you and that one guy used to love. “Don’t waste these halfway usable legs, BBAD,” I sleep hissed at myself. “Who cares that it’s 4:30AM? Use it while you can!”

But I went back to bed like a responsible human after downing my two kinds of muscle relaxers and fell almost immediately back to sleep.

When I woke up again at 8AM to feed the kitties and get my work day started I realized that my quasi-functional body from a few short hours before was a mere memory. I was Bendable Beth again but not in the good way. Standing up was difficult. My body obviously didn’t care that it was going to be another practically perfect day. It used up all of it’s goodness peeing at 4:30AM.

I got through my day, my bunch of calls and work in between bathroom trips. I desperately wanted to go outside but I had to settle for talking to my mom through the screen door while she sat outside on my porch in the cool fall sunshine. I had another call to get to and then my weekly appointment with my precious therapist, Cheryl. My soul sunk a bit deeper but the door was open and I COULD see outside so that would have to be good enough. I wondered if this would be one of those therapy sessions, the kind where I just sob for an hour while moaning and generally feeling sorry for myself. Then it hit me. Cheryl was in Mexico on vacation. We didn’t have a session today. I had an hour without sobbing at my discretion.

The front porch called to me from inside through the screen door.

“You’re going to miss it again if you don’t get out there. The sun is moving behind those houses across the street. If you don’t get out there now you’re going to let another perfect day pass! It’s just a 6 and a half inch threshold to get back inside. You can do this.”

Before I knew it I had dragged Clara out the front door to the sunny spot on my front porch. That’s the sunny spot up there. That’s me enjoying the hell out of that sunny spot. But the sun was moving across the houses across the street. It started to get a bit chilly. I had another call at 4PM. I should get inside before I have to pee again. I got up rather easily using the arm rests on my porch chair. I took a few steps to get my legs moving again. I shoved Clara inside the open screen door so I could hold on to her locked handles while I hoisted myself up that one teeny tiny little step.

You probably know what happened next. Or at least some of it. Most of it even I couldn’t have made up.

My legs wouldn’t lift up. Neither of them. I willed them with all of my might. I spoke sweet gentle thoughts to my own brain and asked her to pass along some of the right signals to my busted up spinal cord to then send sweet messages to my bones and muscles and joints to do the things they had to do to get me inside of the house. And nothing. My cat Owen stood inside of the house looking at me, kindly choosing not to flee the inner safety of my home while I had the door propped open while my body refused to cooperate. I decided to pull Clara back outside to the porch where I sat back down in the now shady spot and pondered my options.

I could call my mom and beg her to come rescue me. But I had just spoken to her a short while before and I knew she was elbow deep in making a chicken for dinner so that wasn’t ideal. I could call my sister but she was literally at my house just a short while ago to scoop my kitty litter. I could hardly expect her to drop everything and come back to bail me out of this ridiculous situation. I was pondering all of the not-ideal-options for people I could call to save me from that 6 and a half inch step when a van pulled up in front of the house across the street. It was my neighbor, goes by the name of Mark. Mark is probably about 55 and has lived across the street of my house for as long as I’ve lived here.

Mark drives a white van with the words, “Marketable Services” across the side. He’s a house painter. He’s actually painted rooms in my own house and is generally a helpful guy when it comes to the random gutter that comes loose from the house or the odd bat the gets in through a tiny hole in the chimney. Mark is helpful. We’ve known each other for 22 years! Surely he’d be willing to help me out of this ridiculous situation. Opportunity for help was right there! I just had to ask for it. So I called to him across the street.

“Hey Mark, can you help me out over here? I’m kind of stuck,” I said.

“Hey Beth, of course I can help, what is it that you need?” As he squints up at me from the porch steps in his painter’s pants and a blue ball cap dotted with paint. He probably thought a gutter had come loose again. He had no idea that it wasn’t house-related help that I needed this time.

Mark isn’t a body builder or anything but he’s a strong old guy. I attempted to explain how I needed him to physically lift up my leg behind the knee so it would bend and the he’d have to manually place my foot on to the step. Sounds simple, right? It involves touching me, something I’d never before thought I’d ever allow Mark to do let alone ask him to do. He got down low behind me to try and do the job.

This basically puts Mark’s face directly in front of my ass. And my legs will not bend.

After some jostling around, we finally get my right foot on the step. At this point I can usually swing the other foot up along side and get myself inside but now I’m stressed out because I WILLINGLY asked a neighborhood handyman to manhandle me from behind. My left leg wouldn’t move at all. Like not a smidgen. Such a dilemma!

At this point Mark decides to get creative and he grasps me by both legs and lifts my entire body off the ground just enough to get my left foot inside the door. As he’s doing this I can feel the brim of his paint-spotted ball cap wedge itself into my actual ass crack. He grunts and like magic both of my feet are now inside of my house where they’re supposed to be. He heaves a sigh of relief, “Ok. You’re in. Do you need anything else? I’m going to leave my window open tonight. Just yell out your window if you need anything at all. I can be over here in seconds.

And I am so relieved to have both legs in inside the house that I completely neglect to realize that I may have solved yet another disability related problem because clearly now I have to sell my house. One cannot have one’s neighbor man smoosh his face into one’s hindquarters and continue to live as we did before this bit of odd intimacy took place. How do we go back to casual hellos across the cobblestones like we did before?

HOW DO WE GO BACK?!?!?

It bears noting at this point in my tawdry tale that the guy who’s coming to my house from the accessibility consultant company to install a small threshold ramp that will once and for all solve this problem (and prevent me from becoming accidentally intimate with any additional neighbors) is coming to my house at 1:30PM tomorrow.

Because of course he is.