Living life with Multiple Sclerosis
One day back in mid-January I took a nearly mile-long walk by the lake near our house. There was a blisteringly cold wind that froze my fingers and stabbed my lungs with each breath, but made me feel very alive. It didn’t matter because my legs were working that day and the call of nature was beckoning. Her voice is always so sweet and calming, it’s a delight to wander at her bidding.
This past Friday I got in the car and drove to an opening in the woods just down the road from our house. Although the spot was less than a quarter mile away, and any other person would have walked, I drove in an effort to reserve as much energy as possible so I could do a bit of exploring. With my trusty cane in my right hand and my camera around my neck, I entered the forest along a well-maintained track. I’d never been to this area before, though I had been planning to check it out since noticing it after we moved earlier this year. The first half of the pictures below are some of the things I discovered. I wish I could share the smell and sound of the leaves crunching beneath my feet; the birds calling and flying in the canopy above; the babbling of the small, mossy spring where dragonflies were sunning themselves; and the joyful feeling that I had stepped out of the real world and into a children’s fantasy book.
I hope you have a chance to enjoy the changing seasons wherever you call home.
God be with you! ❤️, Amy
Well, the deed is done. We moved and have been in our new house for exactly one week! Mercy, moving created a strange brew of fevered, paradoxical feelings. We were always somewhere between excitement and dread; anticipation and foreboding; exhaustion and exultation; and daydreaming about what we were going to do in our new house, then mixing it with the reality of our bank account.
Thankfully, once our old house sold we had about three weeks to pack and get ready to move into our new house. As you know, I struggle mightily with fatigue related to my MS. My Hubby was super busy with work so I created a plan of attack and paced myself to get everything packed and labeled for the move.
The day of our closing finally arrived and we celebrated by having dinner with Hubby’s Mom!
We closed on a Friday and had arranged for family and friends from church to help us move boxes on Saturday. We have such wonderful people in our lives! I sat in a chair and directed traffic so everyone knew where they were going. I’m pretty sure some child labor laws were broken.
Our Cornish Rex cats, Laudy and Pip, made the transition to the new house swimmingly. They hung out in our master bath and closet during the move, then came out once everyone was gone to check the place out. Our new reclining love seat provided a much needed place to take a break. There was little rest for the weary though. We worked hard Sunday afternoon to clear paths and locations for our furniture.
The movers arrived Monday morning at 8:00 a.m. to load up our furniture and appliances from the old house to take to the new. I stuck to my scooter all day in order to make it through the day.
I had done pretty well Saturday and Sunday managing my energy, but I was really struggling to keep going by Monday evening after everything was finally in our new house. Both the cats and I were turned around and upside down.
Somehow everything in life seems to happen all at once. It turned out that my first full infusion of Ocrevus just happened to fall on Thursday of last week, three days after we moved. I expected, and was correct, that I’ve been extra tired since getting the drug. I purposefully allowed myself to work past what I knew was good for me in order to get as much done as possible before the Ocrevus took me down.
Slowly, I’m recovering from my treatment and our new house is feeling more and more like home. I do a little bit each day and my hubby does a whole lot each evening. We’re hoping this is the last move we ever have to make. But even if it isn’t, what I love most about my home is who I share it with 💕.
We placed our house on the market three weeks ago and every day since has been like living in some alternate reality. The endless cycle of picking up, putting away, wiping down, and clearing out in order to hide the fact two cats and their humans live here had grown old by the second day. I’ve seen vlogs of people on YouTube who want you to believe they happily clean their house every day and offer advice on how you could learn to love to do the same. I like a clean house and I’m no slacker when it comes to actually doing the deed, but there is no way I want to adopt some ritual that forces me to scrub the toilet every morning in order to feel joyful.
Nevertheless, with the knowledge people could be coming over at the drop of a hat to see the house, I found myself in a state of constant tidiness not too far removed from the feeling you get just a couple of hours before hosting a dinner party. You have ten things to do at once and the pressure is on to get it all done before the first ring of the doorbell. We don’t host dinner parties anymore thanks to my MS. I don’t have the energy to clean, cook, AND be charming anymore. Most days it’s a struggle just to do one of these through to its completion. So, it wasn’t too far into the first week my prayers grew in fervor for God to intervene and make some way for me to survive this part of the process.
We had two open houses and several showings the first couple of weeks which resulted in one low-ball offer that was $40K below asking price and begged to be rejected. However, we received and accepted a second offer this past Monday, but it was contingent on the young couple’s house selling first. It was such a great offer we thought it was worth giving it a chance. For better or worse, a contingency does not stop your house from being shown, though it usually slows things down to a trickle. So, we were absolutely flabbergasted by the number of people who crawled out of the woodwork the day after Zillow and Realtor.com listed our house as “Contingent”. Our hearts and hopes soared that maybe something would come of it all, but my MS was absolutely seething and out to take revenge because I was not complying with its dictatorial demands for rest.
My prayers took on a begging tone asking Him to help me survive and to get another offer that would press the contingency to a precipice and conclusion. With each passing day my appeals intensified to the point they became more like chants than well-spoken prayers.
In addition to keeping things tidy, it grew harder and harder with each passing day to pack up the cats and put them in the car, move the litter boxes to the garage, stash the scratching posts and then drive somewhere to wait until the coast was clear before reversing the process when I got home. By Tuesday of this week I had become so tired I couldn’t walk or be up for more than five minutes at a time. Matter of fact, my energy didn’t even last long enough for the water to boil in the electric kettle for a cup of tea. The situation was dire!
That’s when it happened, right at the intersection of I Can’t Do This Anymore and God, Please Help Me. We got a full price offer on Friday that ended up being the one we got to keep. The young couple who made the contingency offer on Monday was not able to buy our house until theirs sold so they, unfortunately, fell victim to the standard kick-out clause when we got the second offer.
Our realtor, in the business for years, told me that she had never had a house with a contingency offer all of a sudden get so many people wanting to see it. She was still turning down requests to view our house over the weekend well after the ink on our contract was dry Friday.
My emotions have been all over the place through this whole experience. Excitement and anxiousness mixed with a healthy dose of hope, anticipation and nervousness. But when I saw the final full-price offer I thought I was seeing something wrong. I even looked our listing up online to make sure I had remembered our listing price correctly. Sure enough, I had seen it right the first time. That’s when I started sobbing uncontrollably as a flood of relief and gratitude to God completely made me feel undone by Him. Although I had begged God to intervene on our behalf with continuous pleas, I couldn’t take in how mightily He had answered. As the reality of it all slowly dawned on me, my continuous chant turned into millions of Thank You-s and You’re so good to me-s. I couldn’t stop saying it over and over as tears of joy and thanksgiving fell unashamedly down my cheeks. The fact that, once again like so many other times in my life, He had heard my prayers and intervened on my behalf, left me feeling completely and utterly undone and humbled before Him.
I am writing this in the middle of the afternoon while reclining in bed waiting for my MS to wear out its retaliation for doing too much this week. Let my MS do what it may, I don’t care. I am glowing in the ceaseless cascades of my Father’s love for me. I’d spend every hour of every day left in my life stuck here lying in my bed if I had to just to know and to feel His tender, caring, kind, reassuring love. Thankfully, I know I won’t have to do that. It is His nature to be just that good to me!
~ See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! (1 John 3:1)
As the new year began, Hubby and I put our house on the market. We had been talking about it for a couple of years but never seemed to have the drive to get the house ready.
I turn 50 this year (😳) and have never lived in any other town than the one I was born and raised in. Hubby had lived in a couple of different places before we met and married. However, once he moved to my town it felt like home and we settled into 14 years of happiness here together. Suburban life is great but the everyday traffic and effort to get anywhere of consequence has gotten old. Not only do we work in the city, but we also go to church, do our banking, get groceries, go shopping, go to parks, exercise, and… pretty much everything in the city.
Over the Christmas holiday, we pushed and worked ourselves to the bone thinning the herd of things we had accumulated over the 12 years we have lived in our current house. Trying to do all of this with MS was a challenge every single step and hour along the way. There were days I couldn’t do anything at all, but most days were chopped up into various lengths within what felt like a never ending work-rest cycle.
Anytime we weren’t decluttering and purging we spent scouring real estate listings online. We went to several open houses within our target zone in the city but always kept coming back to the same house we had seen on the first day we started house hunting. It had been on the market for a few months and the owners had reduced the price to a point we felt like we could put in an offer. Since it had been on the market for a while we were sure the sellers would be interested in negotiating with us. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the very day we put our offer in, two more offers were submitted and the pressure was on to make sure ours was the one they accepted. It was an anxious 36 hour wait before we found out whose offer they settled on. I’m very happy to say we got the house! It’s everything we needed and were wanting and we hope we never have to move again.
We listed our current house and are praying it sells quickly, although one never knows about these things. The weather has not been very cooperative so far. I suppose January is not exactly the best time to put a house on the market–it just worked out that way for us. We have had a lot of interest, but no offers yet. It has proven to be a challenge to keep the house in a state of constant cleanliness and overall tidiness. I’m so glad I can stay home and work at it as my energy ebbs and flows. As you all know, I love our cats right up to the edge of being kinda freaky. Whereas before I didn’t really care if they left pieces of litter here and there until I could sweep the floor every few days, now I’m virtually following them around with a dustpan and broom everywhere they go. I clean the kitchen countertops at least five times a day trying to erase the evidence that we let them get up there in the first place. I’ve even shaved (yes, really) the places on the couch where tell-tale signs of cat scratches made it look like we let them use it as a scratching post 😬. Even though they increase the workload, which drains my limited energy all the faster, they’re worth it, but I don’t want to keep it up indefinitely.
I keep finding myself thinking of the old adage “a watched pot never boils” because it coincides perfectly with our current situation at the moment, a watched phone never receives a text that someone wants to look at our house. It’s become a daily exercise of faith to wait this little while without knowing the future regarding when our current home will sell. This has spurred me to think back across the span of my entire life, especially the parts that were hardest, and to see clearly how God worked for my best interest in each and every circumstance. I have absolutely no doubt that He is working to bring the right buyers to us at the right time, not a moment too soon nor a moment too late. Waiting for things to happen is indeed the hardest part while still clothed in this mortal flesh, but it only serves to heighten the ease with which one can find peace and hope for a future with Christ once we no longer need a fixed address on this earth.
Amy's Axons 