You’d think I’d be used to things like this by now but as it turns out, I am not. Another bout of seizures landed me in the hospital earlier this month and it really threw me for a loop. I think I’m still coming back to myself after a two-day visit for seizures, this time for a reason that remains a mystery. It wasn’t hyponytremia this time. These seizures were from a reason the hospital couldn’t identify. We all know how well I do with uncertainty meaning I pretty much suck at it. Ironic really for a person with MS, a disease chock full of uncertainty and mysterious occurrences but true.

Since being release, I’ve been suffering with a resurgence of many of my old reliable MS symptoms – things like pain and random muscle spasms. The pain is intense surging throughout my body, not limited to my useless lower body but heavily affecting my arms and neck thus getting in the way of things I love, things like writing for this very blog and even writing for myself. Haven’t been able to pull it off. I’m trying now nearly a full three weeks after being released and hoping I somehow pull it off. I suppose we will see, won’t we?

As I hop right back to being good old Sick Beth on a full-time basis, I am facing challenges as banal as remembering how to use the toilet to remembering that Sick Beth has zero control over things as simple as my daily schedule, how long I stay in my wheelchair versus when I move to one of the two recliners I sit in when I’m not in my wheelchair. Things like that. require the assistance of another human – one of the two humans charged with moving my legs around and helping me get on and off my sit-to-stand lift – the primary means of moving my body from place to place. You’d think I would be used to the basic indignities involved with using the lift and the vest that goes with it – things like lifting my drooping almost 60-year-old breasts above the tightened vest and getting the simple cotton shorts that I wear on the daily basis to not slip up my butt whilst moving from place to place. It’s all so fundamentally dehumanizing, this experience of having a life that requires the involvement of a second able-bodied human to move me from place to place in my home, the place I spend nearly 100% of me time since becoming disabled as a result of my MS playing the role of Sick Beth full-time. You’d think I’d be used to being full-time Sick Beth by now but as it turns out I am not.

Another reality of being full-time sick Beth is requiring a bidet to use the toilet for pooping. Yep! Here I go again! Writing about gross shit in this case literal shit that is difficult to get out of my butt. Yeah. I know. GROSS. And another reality of being full-time Sick Beth. I grow weary of the burden of these basic realities just as I’m sure that my readers grow weary of reading about it and yet that’s where I once again find myself. A visit to the hospital for random mystery seizures brings us back to this place where I want to thank my readers for sticking it out with me through these years that I’ve been sharing Sick Beth with the world of the online disabled readers community. God, I feel so fortunate for this outlet! Who ever would of thought such a place like this exists for disabled folks like me who so desperately just need to get these feelings out of my head where they just bang around making me feel so bad about myself.

I turn to words once again, hoping there could once again be some respite in the written word.

I’m left to wonder how long it will be that I feel like a stranger in a strange land living my life in this fundamentally broken vessel, this broken body that is my blessing and my curse. Will it be over in a few more days as it has in the past after such traumas as being forced from the safe space that is my home to the cold, scary world of the inpatient hospital visitor? Or will it be months this time? It seems to get longer and more complex with each experience. Maybe i’ts also a function of the simple fact that I’m also merely getting older as time goes on, aging just like we all do. A simple human reality from which I am clearly not exempt regardless of how much I wish to deny it.