MS Walk

April is the busiest time of year; at least for me.

At work I am in the middle of Dance Season.
At school I am in the middle of Exams.
In life I am desperately trying to hold it all together.

April is also the biggest month of the year for Fund raising for Research to try and find a cure for Multiple Sclerosis. I was diagnosed with MS 6 years ago, and have been on several different medications and treatment plans in the hopes to try to control the effects of the disease.
Most of the time I'm doing very well. At the moment my body seems to be holding up remarkably well, but this has not always been the case.
I have been temporarily paralyzed as an infant, and in my adolescence, I am partially blind in one eye, I cannot feel my toes and I have decreased sensitivity all over my body (ie, if my phone vibrates in my pocket, 90% of the time, I will not feel it) and this is at a good time.

I am not upset with the cards I have been dealt. The challenges I have faced have made me a fighter, and a strong willed and stubborn person; in a good way (i think). I have risen to the occasion and make peace with my situation everyday, I am glad for my current good health and I am thankful for the recoveries I have made in the past.
Every year since my diagnosis my family and friends and I have walked in the Super Cities Walk for Multiple Sclerosis. I believe that my family and friends walk to support me, I walk for everyone else. 

There are many other people who are in worse shape than I am. There are people who have been fighting this disease for longer than I, there are people who have just received their diagnosis and there are people anxiously awaiting a diagnosis. There are people who have been more permanently affected (whether physically or psychologically) by this disease than I have, and I raise funds and walk every year to give them hope.

If you have MS, or know someone who is affected by the disease please make sure that they know that there are thousands of people out there that are supporting them, wishing and praying for a cure and doing what they can; even if it's just giving pocket change, to raise money for MS research.
Last year, the chapter of the MS Walk that my team attended raised over $50,000.

If you can, please support myself, or my team by pledging us. Brandy's Bandits.

My page:
http://mssoc.convio.net/site/TR/MSWalk/OntarioDivision?px=1228615&pg=personal&fr_id=1294

or my team:
http://mssoc.convio.net/site/TR/MSWalk/OntarioDivision?pg=team&fr_id=1294&team_id=5794

Thank you for your support.

***PLEASE NOTE***
If you have MS, have a friend or family member who has MS, or are affected by this disease in any way, I am available and willing to answer ANY questions that you may have to the best of my abilities, and I would love to support you however I can.
If you want to reach out to me, don't be shy, please feel free. I want to help.
I can share tips, tricks, warning signs, diets, everything and anything that has been helping me to keep MS at bay.

MS FACTS:
-MS is a complex degenerative disease that affects the nervous system
-MS affects men and women
-Women are more than 3 times more likely to develop MS than men
- It is usually diagnosed between the ages of 18-40
-Canadians have the highest rates of people living with MS
-Everyday 3 more Canadians are diagnosed with MS

Of Denial, Depression and Death

This personal essay was an assignment of mine. The professor asked us to write a personal essay about the grim topic Death. I found the challenge easy to write about, but difficult to publish. The courage it took to write all of this down was difficult to find, but I surprised myself.

I hope you like it as much as my professor did. His review was glowing and sent me to tears. It has been printed and will hang, framed, where it will inspire me on a daily basis.

As a child I saw the world, as most children do, for the beauty of every movement, every smell and each idea. The challenges of youth; caring for my latest digital pet, losing my best “Steely” Marble or choosing whose house to play at, were no stranger to me or any of my young neighbours. However, unlike most of my childhood playmates, the idea of mortality was an ever present idea fixed in the back of my mind, solidly stuck between naptime and lunch.

Mortality was taught to me early in life by two major events:

1-      the peaceful passing of my two greatest idols; my two great-grandmothers

2-      much of my youth spent in and around Hospitals

These circumstances proved to me, while still very young, that life is finite. Life was an intangible idea for most 5 year olds to grasp, but I clung to the idea of a finite life like a dog clings to his favourite toy. Unpredictable, imperceptible and undeniably puzzlingly, I saw the possibility of death everywhere.

Unlike the currently grown version of myself, able to over think everything, as a child I saw death only as a coming end and strived not to regret anything, should the end come. Most of every moment I spent smiling, showing my parents how happy I was and every time I left a room; every single time, I would kiss each of my parents and tell them I loved them. Looking back, I see I was a bit over dramatic.

Like Virginia Woolf, caught in the mesmerizing light of the life and struggles of a moth, I too was able to see the beauty in the smallest bit of life. For 15 years I cared for a tree. My classmates and I were each given a seed of a Fir tree in Kindergarten. I planted that seed, and every day from the moment the seed touched the moist, freshly turned soil in my backyard, I cared for, and loved that tree. Months I cried over the fruitless patch of dirt begging and pleading for my little seed to live.

A light green sprout at first, then a sprig, then at last a bristle of pines. The tree grew with me, like a sibling, though I felt more of a protective maternal kind of role for the tree. I delighted when the tree grew taller than me and fought back tears as I had to trim the scraggly ends of its branches. That tree was better cared for than any pet but despite all of my dedication and hard work, I watched the pines start to discolour and radiate up the trunk of my beloved tree. Despite my daily efforts and a very difficult transplantation I lost my tree in the last year of my high school education, and wept unabashedly at the loss of such a long-time friend.

Once I thought myself an emotional rock, hard, stable, constant but not impervious to damage. If the grief was great enough my sorrow would flow uncontrollably from me. In Consolation to his Wife Plutarch writes that he would have his wife compose herself and act dignified after the loss of their youngest child and daughter.

“[…] a virtuous woman must remain uncorrupted, but in sorrow too she must remember that excess is to be avoided.”

If the pain cuts deep enough, I feel no guilt in showing it. In fact, I find more guilt in the façade of hiding my pain. At the end of my final year of high school, the same year I lost my tree, my body started to fail me.

Throughout my adolescence the surreal feeling that something just wasn’t right, haunted me. I had the perfect life; an amazingly happy and close family, great friends and good grades. After years of being told that life was only true in fairytales, I started to think that something else must be coming. Death’s ever present, ominous existence never left me, and I started to see both Life and Death as partners dancing a duet around me.

While the rest of my friends were busy pinning up curls, wrapping themselves in silk, teetering in heels, contemplating how much makeup to wear to the Prom, I had gone completely blind in my right eye. When my classmates were complaining of hangovers during exams, I was busy trying to hold on to a pencil after losing all of the feeling in my right hand.

That summer, at 16, I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis; a debilitating disease that attacks the nervous system, often causing permanent nerve damage. The realization that you have a very real, very painful disease, would, to any normal person, make them start to consider their own mortality. Contrarily I felt relief in the reassured knowledge of the “finity” of my life. The disease inspired me, and drove me to strive for the best of life, now. Even during my third year of University I was fighting the disease and smiling. I was relearning how to walk after my MS progressed from the waist down. While other students were lounging in the midst of an academic strike, I was pointedly turning my nose up against the notion of ever encroaching Death and surrender.

6 years ago I would have said the famous words “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”, currently however, I find myself sympathizing with the late Christopher Hitchens whose reply to the same line was,

Oh, Really?

On February 29^th 2012 I lost one of my grandmothers to Cancer. It was expected, and in the end nearly a relief, but the loss has left me feeling empty and yet, the most afraid of Death growing ever nearer. The tendrils of depression have latched on to me, like an octopus’s suction cup covered tentacles suffocating and immobilizing its’ prey.

A month later, the pain of the loss of my grandmother is no less real than it was a month ago. Plutarch, after learning of his daughter’s death wrote to his wife,

“I cannot see, my dear wife, why these and similar qualities which delighted use when she was alive should now distress and confound us when we bring them to mind.”

As dark as many of the recesses of my mind are at present, I cannot help but connect with what Plutarch has just said, even though it is difficult to separate the great qualities which were admired and the events surrounding the loss of a loved one. My grandmother’s life was long, and happy. She was a proud wife, mother, grandmother and friend- those are not traits to be mourned, but cherished and remembered instead.

“I estimate that it must have been about 1910 that she (Käthe Kollwitz) first took death as her theme, when she was no more than 43 or 4. I stop to think about it now because of my own age, of course.[…]I recall, I did not have such a feeling about death.”

Lu-Hsun reflects on the effects of age on his own sense of mortality. Contrary to the passage above, the next passage from his essay Death sounds like a conversation I have had in my own head, far too many times.

“Since last year, whenever I lay on my wicker chair recovering from illness, I would consider what to do when I was well, what articles to write, what books to translate or publish. […] this sense of urgency, which I never had before, was due to the fact that unconsciously I had remembered my age. But still never directly thought of “death”.

Through all my awareness of death, I have not truly thought of death as an imminent possibility until recently. In the aftermath of my family’s loss, the nearly-tangible possibility and certainty of Death seems closer than ever. The fantasy of my physical health and fairytale life evaporated into the toxic smoke of the haze of depression.

Awareness of my own faults in my genetic makeup that have no cure and no sign of improvement have taken root in my soul. Instead of smiles and fantasies, all I can focus on are the physically painful daily reminders of my slow and continuous decline into fragility and illness.

Although my brain seems poisoned by wisps of depression, I still have the desire to keep death at bay. I wear a helmet while riding a bike, I never run with scissors, and I look both ways before crossing the street; twice. The simple beauty of Virginia’s Woolf’s The Death of the Moth, moved me to tears. I empathized immediately with the struggling creature and found myself desperately wishing that it would somehow manage to live. I miss seeing the world through the innocent eyes of a child; everything is magical and precious, whereas I see everything tainted with War, Pollution, Civil Unrest, Political Scandals and Debt.

Without pain, how would we know what joy feels like? I mourn death, I understand death and I fear death. I have known my share of death, and I will continue to fight through life, for the good, for love, for joy, so that when death comes I will have nothing to regret. I am not ashamed to show my pain and cry for death, whether it is for a dying tree, an animal in a ditch at the side of the road or for the loss of a human life; a family member or a stranger on the evening news.

I want to be like Virginia Woolf’s moth. I would like to live gracefully flitting from pane to pane in the storyboard of my life, struggling through the hard times and illness, only to fly again triumphantly, then to fall again, fight and eventually surrender to the eventuality of death; proud of every part of my life.