MS and Your Important Personal Relationships

Important relationships take effort and energy — even without the added challenges of MS. While MS does pose some additional challenges, it can also enrich relationships and bring people closer together. The primary steps to figuring out how to deal with MS in your personal interactions is to:

1. Recognize that the disease affects all of you — whether you have the disease or care about someone who does.

2. Decide whom you want to tell about the MS and what you want them to understand about it.

3. Look for ways to make room for MS in your personal and professional relationships without giving it more time, attention, and energy than it really needs.

Disclose information or No?

Telling others about your MS may be the first thing you want to do — or the last. No two people feel exactly the same about disclosing their MS to others. Keeping in mind that once the information is out there, you can’t take it back, the key is figuring out when disclosure is in your best interest and when it is not. Read more about disclosing to family, friends, employers and colleagues, and someone you are dating.

One-on-One Relationships - Keeping the Balance

When one person in a couple is affected by MS, the other person lives with it as well. To keep your relationship healthy and balanced, it’s important to make sure that both of you stay on the giving and receiving end of the relationship, in spite of whatever changes MS may bring. Learn how to manage MS as team and enhance your communication and intimacy.

Parenting 

Family Planning Decisions — The good news is that women and men with MS can be successful parents of happy, healthy children. Learn the up-to-date findings about the impact of MS on conception, pregnancy, delivery, and breastfeeding, and the impact of childbearing on MS from the National MS Society at this link:  http://www.nationalmssociety.org/living-with-multiple-sclerosis/healthy-living/pregnancy/index.aspx

Talking with Children about MS — Kids tend to worry when they know something’s up — even if Mom or Dad has no visible symptoms. Get some hints about how and when to begin talking about MS with your children and check out the special resources for young children and teens from the National MS Society at this link:  http://www.nationalmssociety.org/multimedia-library/brochures/for-children--teenagers/index.aspx

Taking Care of Yourself While Caring for Someone Else

Caring for someone with a chronic illness like MS can be deeply satisfying. Spouses and partners, family, and friends can be drawn more closely together by their shared concerns and collaborative efforts. But care giving can also be physically and emotionally exhausting, particularly for the primary caregiver. While this is most often a partner or spouse, the primary caregiver may also be an adult child, parent, or friend. Whoever you are, remember that paying attention to your own health and well-being is essential to being able to care for someone else.

Book Review: Point Source -- Thriller involving Multiple Sclerosis

By John M. Williams

I love reading thrilling novels packed with international intrigue, suspense, action, conundrums, arrogance, murder, ambition, character development, independence, subliminal messages and contemporary political history. In Point Source by Dr. Richard G. Pellegrino, readers are treated to a unique medical thriller with the qualities that I love in a novel. Readers are swiftly carried from day-to-day and event-to-event over three months in the lives of people who accidentally stumble unto an international terrorist plot by North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, one of President George W. Bush’s three Axis of Evil leaders, to assassinate South Korean statesman and candidate for the presidency of South Korea Bo Li Yeung. The weapon of choice is a biological weapon of mass destruction.The author has two missions in the novel. One is to awaken the readers to the symptoms and the daily physical and mental challenges accompanying MS, and to illustrate the courage it takes to adapt to the progressive limitations of the disease. The second mission is to entertain the reader with a who-done-it mystery that operates on several levels. He succeeds with both missions.
Unlike any other book I have read that covers MS, Point Source provides personal insights into the disease, and celebrates the courage; struggles, determination, and sense of humor people require to deal with it. The characters with MS are convincingly human, and when I finished the book I did not have the impression that MS individuals are supermen and women performing Herculean feats. Instead I learned that MS affects 3-4 million people worldwide. Through the sometimes contentious relationship between Dr. Angela Donatelli and her mother Marie, who has MS, the reader discovers that this progressive disorder of the nervous system is far from well understood. The deterioration of motor control is a central symptom of the disease, but there is a mental dimension as well; one that affects a patient's cognitive functions, from memory to the ability to complete complex tasks. Not everyone with MS experiences such cognitive impairment, and for those who do, the effects are usually very subtle. While I know there is no cure for MS, I learned the cause of MS is equally unknown.
The book educates the reader on the evolving struggles that people with MS face daily. It exposes the imperative of finding a cure. Knowing what I do about the promise of stem cell research, then I believe stem cell research should be funded, not only because it might help with finding a cure for MS, but also for its potential in curing or alleviating a host of other immune-system and degenerative diseases. The book also shows the hope that people with MS have in the medical profession’s efforts to discover, treat and eventually cure the disease.
Dr. Pellegrino is one of the country’s top neurologists, and he specializes in working with MS patients.

Living Well Now... even when you certainly don't feel like it.

Living well now is a state of mind as much as it is a state of being.  Anyone with Multiple Sclerosis can tell you about waking up and not having the strength or maybe not even the ability to get up in the morning, stretch out your legs and make it to the bathroom.  Well the reality of the pain and anxiety associated with MS is apparent - but so are many other things.  Think about this:

1. You don't have terminal cancer!  
2. You're alive and able to talk about it to someone who hasn't quite learned yet to live well with MS...  
3. Someone on this earth is with you and wants to do whatever they can to help you through your journey with MS; maybe its your family, maybe its me...
4. Your creator will never burden you with anything you can not handle...
5. The sun is up, the world is turning, there are still places you haven't seen and things you haven't done...
6. You can manage your pain... 
7. You can get past the psychological trauma from MS and live appreciating every day you get to live - where there is a will, there is a way...

Just take a moment to think of one good thing in your life every day and write it down on the calendar.  When the month changes, go back and look at each one and read it out loud to yourself or anyone.  You will smile.  You will know that you can push past the reality of MS on to the reality that your life is moving right along...  go with it!  It may not happen in a day or a week or even a month... but you will soon realize there are thousands of reasons to get up despite the condition.  You'll rise, think of the good things, look in the mirror (when you finally do get to the bathroom) and say "I'm going to celebrate life today, such as it is, and live well now."  Today really is the first day of the rest of your life...  tvcc

Find more detailed information at our website: http://sites.google.com/site/livingwellwithmsnow/