When it all began

I’m not quite sure when it all began, to be perfectly honest. Ok, that’s not quite true. To those of you for whom ‘roughly’ or ‘sort of’ is good enough, I do know. But I am an accountant, ok? I like things to be accurate, but for the sake of argument, we’ll assume that the events that I recorded in a journal that I started to write when I realised that things were looking a little dodgy, and the dates I wrote down, are the relevant ones.

Those dates were good enough for the doctors, so they’ll have to be good enough for you. And I will have to poke up with a little imprecision.

The first sign that anything might be wrong was in June 2006. I went for a walk in the Kent countryside, on a gorgeous summer’s day. As I set off, I noticed that I was tripping over tree roots across the track as it wound up a hill. This would not be especially surprising – roots are there to be tripped over after all – except that it was almost impossible to avoid tripping without a supreme effort and careful concentration.

I didn’t think too much about it. I suppose I assumed that I was just tired and not really up to the walk.

Then about a month later, I had a frightening experience. No, scratch that. It was a terrifying experience.

I was on my way home from work. I got off the train to walk the final few hundred yards. It’s broadly flat, so I could manage it even after a few drinks too many.

On this occasion, I was struggling to move my legs. I mean, at all. It was as much as I could do to put one in front of the other. I have no idea how long it took me to drag myself along that short distance – probably not long, but it felt like forever.

By the time I got home, I was exhausted. I lay on my bed and wept. Something was wrong, but I had no idea what.

Introduction

There are things that only happen to other people. Usually they are rare things, such as winning the lottery. They aren’t the everyday things such as having a baby; they are the not-so-everyday things – not being able to have a baby.

Well, I have one of those not-so-everyday things. I have multiple sclerosis. I am somebody else.

Apparently there are 85,000 people (give or take) in the UK with MS. Everybody seems to know somebody with MS. Yet almost nobody actually has MS.

Your cousin’s sister has it; your auntie’s doctor; your best friend’s mother’s sister. They all have it, but the person you know doesn’t have it. Isn’t that slightly odd?

As best I can make out, I’m even more of a somebody else. I am male and I was diagnosed with MS at the age of 44 – on 29 March 2007, to be precise. Apparently, MS mostly affects women under 40. I suppose that statistic would once upon a time have been some comfort to me – that it was one less thing to worry about.

Well, not that I especially worried about anything to do with my health. I’ve always been generally fit, never missed more than the odd day from work with anything really.

But now I have something. Well, for a little over a year I’ve had something, but I didn’t know what it was for most of that time. If you get my drift.

So anyway, this is my story of a short journey to where I am today.

To you I am somebody else. You can be content in your life that it is to the likes of me that inconvenient things happen.

To me (and to those who truly know me) I know I am somebody.