Everything online seems to have suddenly speeded up, after two years of slowly building it day by day, person by person, last month it all just skyrocketed starting with over 3000 new twitter followers bring me to my first goal of 50,000 now passed. Along with the always growing number of tweets I get daily, the interest in all my blogs has also made a huge jump and although none of this was my starting goal or intention, it feels really wonderful to know so many people are out there enjoying what I do daily. Those who are still here since the start, know that I quickly did set a purpose for all of it, no, not just giving me something to do, but far more importantly trying to pass on what I know about living with illness and surviving being housebound. It is also the wonderful proof of one of the things I keep saying, if you want to be happy being housebound, buy a computer, get online and fill your life with all the things you never thought you would do, as there are a million possibilities, everyone will find something to love, something to do and the people you will meet along the way, well you will be amazed, that done there is then no room to be lonely or depressed. Thank you to each and every one of you!

I have been trying several times every day to stretch the muscles in the back of my legs, in the hope that it will relieve some of the pain and stop them becoming tight and eventually locked. It is actually really hard to stop myself sitting with my feet taking the weight on just the balls of my foot and my toes, I have lost count how many times each day I am suddenly aware that once again my toes are hurting and the reason is clear. There are so many things that we do without being aware of them happening, I bet every single person has, at least, one thing that they can note as being re-occurring events, that have no thought of any type behind them. The problem with this little habit is that not only is it causing me pain right now, it is speeding up the fact that one day my leg muscles will seize up totally and once locked, walking will become almost impossible without an aid of some sort. Even knowing that fact and knowing that the exercises are important, I am finding them not just painful to do, but something that I just forget about until the pain of tightly gripping calve muscles and toes that are on fire, manage to remind me.

The longer I am ill and the more exercises and things that doctors say might make things a bit better, the more I have discovered that most just don’t make any difference at all. I suppose they must help some people or they wouldn’t keep telling us to do them, but I have learned that mainly they are a way of wasting time. At first, I used to do anything that I was told to because I believed that they would change things, but the truth for me, at least, was they did nothing. I still have that hope that this time, this exercise, for this muscles problem, will make the difference they promise, but somewhere inside me the lessons I have learned take over and I stop doing them within days, that part of me that says there is no point, takes over. I suppose it is because I used to exercise for at least 2 hours every day, I did every sort of stretch, weightlifting and cardiovascular exercise I could, but if 3 years of doing that made no difference, how can some silly little flexing of a muscle change anything.

I suppose that I have become resigned to my future, something that is very different than giving into it. MS isn’t an illness of the muscles, it is an illness that destroy’s nerves and there is no exercise on earth that will ever make any difference at all, as to how a nerve works or doesn’t. It is that knowledge that I am resigned to, as the lesions spread the more damage they will do and there isn’t anything anyone can do. Even knowing that doesn’t make me want to give up, I have a life to live until that final lesion appears that will put an end to it. All I can do for now is try stop these stupid legs from hurting me as much as they are doing just now, if I get the pain under control, then, like all the rest of it I will sweep it into the bundle of things just to live with.

I went to bed at the normal time last night and fell asleep quickly only to be woken in what felt like seconds by my alarm clock, clearly that second had lasted 11 hours, but I honestly wasn’t aware of a single one of them and I have been left almost as tired as I was when I headed to bed. I seem to be far more tired again, I’m not sure why but I am finding everything is happening slower than I think it is, no matter what I am doing time just vanishes around me. Even my typing has gone to pot, I touch type with a reasonable speed normally but I can’t trust a single one of my ten fingers to hit the right key, even if it finds it, it seems to hover above it in a stuttering action, unsure if it is actually doing the right thing, then every few keys it stutters to long and the wrong one appears in front of me. My whole body has gone into slow motion and it’s happy to stay that way, as no matter how much I try to move quicker all that happens is the same. Today is going to last forever, in one respect, but in real time I am going to be nothing, just like last night was, guess what it’s lunchtime already.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 03/04/12 – The steps from legs to housebound 

I have had a very rare occasion happen today, for the first time since Christmas I had a visitor. Jake phoned yesterday just for one of his weekly chats and asked if he could stop in today for coffee. It’s strange how so many weeks pass without my seeing anyone other than Adam and the very occasional a nurse, but I don’t realise the time has gone. Something seems to change inside when your contacts with others is slowly reducing. In part it must have to do with expectations but I can’t find a point where it went from daily to monthly and beyond. I don’t feel lonely and I don’t