68 Guns/Letters

Originally this entry was going to be about a woman I met a few years back at a conference in New Jersey. Her name was Elisa, and we hit it off well enough to exchange addresses. A few weeks after we met she sent me a letter. The dark part: I never wrote back. Really more dork of me than dark, but I thought posting about it made a nice symmetry with Beginning of the End. Things like that amuse me. But today I got a letter much more keeping with the 'dark' theme of the last few entries.

A little background: about 1 1/2 weeks ago I plowed into another car. I've driven in Minnesota for 20 years, never had that happen before. The day it happened was a major snowstorm and this area saw literally hundreds of accidents. No one was hurt, but I was pretty shook up by it. When I get really emotionally upset my MS symptoms kick into overdrive, so when the cops came to fill out the accident report I was having real mobility problems. Today I get a letter from the DMV that I need to provide something from my doctor stating I can safely operate a motor vehicle.

This may be just a formality and nothing to fret about. One thing MS does to a person mentally is erode ones sense of certainty. So I fret anyway. I just don't know how this will all play out. That is frightening.

So these two items cover partof the title, but you're probably wondering about the "68 Guns" bit. It's a song by The Alarm. The first line keeps going through my head: "And now they're trying to take my life away ..."

I'm probably just overreacting, but that is really how this feels. So many people think MS means STOP or CAN'T. It doesn't. It means CHANGE and ADAPT.

"And now they're trying to take my life away"

Know what? It's not much, but you CAN'T HAVE IT