My MS has delivered me today it’s favorite thing to try and cope today. It is one of those symptoms that varies hugely, ‘Brain Fog’ can be simple thin mist to a ‘pea-souper’ or as I think of it a thick custard and that custard is thick. I am having real problems keeping my brain in one place, I am flitting all over the place and typing is an interesting process, all I can say this thank God for spell check, without it I doubt you would be able to make any sense out of this at all.

There was a strange thing I caught myself doing a little while ago and I didn’t like it. On TV and in films you sometimes see people sat looking totally blank, zombied, for some reason they usually are sat their with their mouth hanging open, I was doing exactly that. Why? I can’t find a single reason for it. I don’t know how but I was staring into space and my jaw had dropped, as though the control muscles that normally hold your mouth shut had just switched off. one minute I was typing stopped to read what was on the screen and then suddenly I wasn’t doing anything, I had become that horrific image I have of people when everything has stopped, except the basics needed to maintain life. Clearly I pulled myself out of it but I am left with this fear that, that is how it starts, that it will happen for longer and longer spells until I can’t pull myself back.

I think that is my biggest fear and always has been from the day that I was told I had MS, this vision that I will be eventually a zombie that just sits there, having spasms and twitching. I expect that all of use with any type of illness that effects the brain fear that end, that is why I believe that we all have to stimulate our minds, especially when it doesn’t want to be. I may be wrong about this but I have been doing so from the point when my MS turned progressive and so far, as I hope is clear in my on line activity, I am still very much in control. Loosing more and more of myself is a scary place and I nor medicine are unfortunately unable to stop it. I accept the physical changes, as strangely they are reasonably easy to deal with, there is always a way round or a way to manage a physical problem but your brain, it is just a totally different thing. It isn’t just Self-determination, it goes further than that, we all fear that being locked inside a body that does nothing and not being able to make ourselves understood, what if it was the other way round.

You could say that would be a blessing if you didn’t actually have a mind that processed anything, didn’t know what was happening around you, or what people were saying, what they were doing to you, I agree. It is the getting there I fear, that slow loss, bit by bit, of me, until I am gone. It is that possibility that keeps me fighting to keep my brain active, of having things round me that trigger my memories. I can only hope, that I will not have that happen to me, and I can try to stay as ‘with it’ as I can. The question still remains which is worse the slow slip to being a real Zombie or the physical drop into a world were you are locked inside, either way there isn’t a choice.