I saw this quote on a friend's post on FB today, and couldn't help but think of my 'meeting with the sidewalk' I had last week.
...To dry my eyes and laugh at a fall,
and baffled, get up and start again...
Robert Browning
'Pre' my MS diagnosis, I typically reacted to injury with laughter and some comment about how silly I was. Now, I break down into tears at the simplest finger in a door, electric fence jolt, or a fall. I believe it is due to a combination of the nerves being sensitive anyway and most likely some psychological factors. I mean, really, can you imagine your 'accident list' more than doubling in one year, and continually getting worse every year? When I took this fall, leaving the gym I attend, I remember surprise (I had just been thinking that I was walking really well!), that my hands stung and was doing a mental check on making sure I was okay. This was the first fall due to my toe catching resulting in an almost trip wire type fall, like I was a walking tree and someone had just chopped me down. Then the tears came! My hands HURT. My chin was bleeding. And WHAT was going to become of me?! That is why I believe that a person's acceptance of their disease, injury, or what ever it may be has a lot to do with the symptoms and problems the person encounters.
Here is a web site I found, with some fairly good information on the pain that comes with MS. MS pain I don't know, it's hard to judge. I believe my back pain is due to my poor posture... which is most likely due to my MS, with weak muscles, fatigue and the all over 'short circuiting' of my nerves. My figures are always sore and I never could get someone to give me a reason why, other than 'you have MS'. But really, is the pain that comes with MS so bad to warrant the use of drugs, say marijuana? But, that is for another conversation. Now, I leave you with the full poem that got me writing about my fall (though I must have been intending to share it because I made sure to have my husband to get pictures of my chin....).
By Robert Browning 1812–1889 Robert Browning Escape me?
Never—
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth,
While the one eludes, must the other pursue.
My life is a fault at last, I fear:
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed.
But what if I fail of my purpose here?
It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
And, baffled, get up and begin again,—
So the chase takes up one's life, that's all.
While, look but once from your farthest bound
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope goes to ground
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
I shape me—
Ever
Removed!
