Shortly after my diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis I would be in a public place and see people who I suspected had MS.  It was as though I was more oblivious before my diagnosis to people who had difficulty walking, were using a cane, walker, or wheelchair.  Now all of a sudden my attention was riveted towards others who were having mobility issues.  Coincidentally I met a man in a medical waiting room and he just happened to have MS but was at more advanced stage of this disease than I am.  I write about our conversation here and how it gave me a greater perspective on how this disease is a very different experience for each individual who has it.  I do hope you share your perspective as well. 

I saw the man while I was in my general practitioner's waiting room.  He sat two seats away from me staring off into space.  Situated in the space before him was a walker.  He looked fifty-ish at most.  I didn't think age had anything to do with his condition and I guessed right off that he probably had Multiple Sclerosis.  The silence was broken when he said out loud, "I like my doctor.  Do you have doctor "X"?"  When I replied that I did, we began to compare notes.  I then asked if he had MS.  When he said yes I responded with a "me too."  At that he said a startling thing:  "I hate seeing people who are still walking around and have MS."  Something about the way he said it though, made me take no offense.  "They didn't catch mine in time I guess," he said forlornly.

I thought about things from his perspective.  I suppose I would hate it too, to be seeing what I used to have blatantly displayed, all these walking reminders of loss.  It brought to mind when I had experienced both a miscarriage and then infertility for some years.  I remember walking around the city during my lunch hour and everywhere I went, there were pregnant ladies.  I hated them all.  And I hated myself for feeling that way.  There was a poem I once read by a woman who has just lost her father to cancer.  In her poem she tried to explain that during the days after his death she could no longer bear to see the smiles of elderly shiny domed men who resembled her father.  She loathed to see the living image of what she had lost. 

So yes I could understand what this stranger was saying to me.  In some ways the sight of him and his walker frightened the daylights out of me.  "This could be me in years to come," I thought to myself.   It seemed to me that after my diagnosis, my world was inhabited by great numbers of people bearing canes, walkers, or riding in wheelchairs.  My mind seemed especially cognizant of the sight of metal attached to people. I was suddenly more aware of this population which had simply eased in and out of my periphery before I was diagnosed with MS.  One day it seemed almost a spiritual conspiracy of synchronicity.  I was going to the library and was hit by some MS symptoms, leaving me to hobble, rather than walk into the place.  And everywhere I looked, it seemed to me that someone was walking with a limp or had a cane.  Was the universe mocking me or was this a way for me to see my humanity, frailty, and vulnerability mirrored in the faltering steps of others?