Not Always Family-friendly

While reading an interesting article on one man's battle with limitations from Multiple Sclerosis that I wanted to share, the foul language stopped me from posting it. Why use such crude words to get the point across in formal writing? Then, it hit me. I faced the honest truth that MS is not always family-friendly. When viewed from the inner crevices of a victim's mind, the effects of MS are often a corrupt, gruesome, and distorted excuse for being human.

*sigh*

A Color Full Experience

There is a colorful word in the English language that I have become markedly familiar with: experience.  Embracing the white end of positive, grazing the dark end of negative, and richoceting betwixt the colorful myriad which spans the distance extremes, my life has truly been a color full spectrum.

Yet, when it comes to job hunting as an antiquated neurological scribble, the one repetitive requirement where none of mine applies in the current work force: experience.

And the color quickly fades into the background of irony...

An Interesting Connection: Bell's Palsy Tied to Multiple Sclerosis ?

For me, there has been a curious correlation between Bell's Palsy and Multiple Sclerosis. I recall biting into a Carl's Jr. hamburger...the tang of the special sauce...the immediate tingling across my lips...the burning in my tongue...the lingering taste of metal. Later, an excruciating pain shot through my right ear and across my jawline, as if someone stabbed my eardrum with a javelin. The following morning, while brushing my teeth, the side of my mouth completely froze. I could not rinse or spit; my eye refused to close; the right side of my face paralyzed from forehead to shoulder top. Oddly, the stabbing pain simultaneously dimmed as the paralysis spiked. Diagnosis: Bell's Palsy.

An urgent care visit left me with an explanation that severe inflammation was apparently compressing the cranial nerve which controls facial muscle functions. The steroid therapy would hopefully help tame the symptoms, which could last anywhere from weeks to months. Within three weeks, the paralysis ended and I was able to retire my sexy, black pirate eye patch.

That was roughly 14 years ago. Looking back, I realize the tingling down my cheeks and around my lips and the burning in my tongue that I experience now each day appears to be a magnified extension of my initial episode. The symptoms never truly subsided, only progressed.

In the linked study below on Peripheral (Seventh) Nerve Palsy, "Fukazawa and colleagues reported facial palsy as first symptom of MS in 4.7% of 107 patients with MS." Hmmm. So, it is not too radical for me to question if Bell's Palsy was my first (unidentified) symptom of Multiple Sclerosis.

An interestingly mysterious connection...

https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/443681