This stuff is from my old wordpress blog which i refuse to use, mostly because it's not worth the headache
Regarding Ricky
In true ‘ricky’ fashion I have neglected to tend to these musings/thoughts in quite some time. For the longest time (about 3 years or so) I have been having the hardest time getting around, and feeling my legs**(my legs have had intermittent numbing). At the first on-set I just wrote it off as some weird fluke, perhaps some Floridian voodoo I wasn’t to familiar with. It started off as a minor numbing in one leg that seemed to coincide with the cold (November-march) and it would seem to fade or not be as noticable once the warm season started. I remember that first year I saw a G.P. who ran his tests and diagnosed me with a b-12 deficiency. I guess it because I don’t like to trust doctors but I really didn’t put too much stock in that diagnosis. Well regardless I followed or semi-followed that doctors orders, once the warm season started again it seemed that everything was fine or just ‘fine enough’. As long as my foot didn’t plop off I was fine enough to work….When the ‘cold’ season came back I immediately wrote it off as b-12 nonsense. With the end of the first spell and well into the second ‘go around’ I was really prone to loosing my balance and I mean REALLY loosing my balance. Thank God for the flea market, I ended up buying this nifty ergonomic cane (aside from someone making an occasional pimp joke – life was ok.) Fast forward a bit to cold season ’09, at about the onset of winter I remember that it felt like my feet would sometimes be burning (at work) and not in a jock-itch burn but in an acetylene torch kind of burn. I was also having an exceptionally difficult time trying to get around. I waited for my wife to come home from a trip before I went back into the emergency room. (actually the second time I went I went in with the assistance of an ambulance since I couldn’t walk under my own volition).
Modesty is a luxury
on my first day, while people twirl all around my bed and disappear off to hidden corners I just lay there. While all this is going down there are other powers that be in the hospital analyzing specific MRIs and other such tests. While I lay there with an ever-growing belly, I was doing my best to put on a braveface. The diagnosis we eventually received didn’t come as a surprise because the neurologists were saying it all along.
Multiple Sclerosis
I’ll end todays entry with this…. I try not to be too schmaltzy (despite what my wife says) I’ve never been an avid reader of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, I’ve been blessed with an amazing wife, one that worries way too much for one person, in order to not over diagnose myself I’ve limited myself to what I’ve learned about MS… this tends to work for me.
I typed that almost a year ago on April 1st 2010, this next bit is from 09 after we came back from our honeymoon
june 17th 2009
… we finally made it down the aisle, or in our case down the sidewalk toward the gazebo.
The reception went better than I had planned. No fights, no loud words. Being legally drunk for 80 percent of the day didn’t hurt matters any. Most of the food didn’t go to waste, more than half of the keg was consumed, and Porky the Slaughtered Pig was delicious. I’m by NO means an expert on anything let alone married life, but from what I’ve felt so far… it’s not all too different from living together in sin.
on a boat we made it to the boat despite some last minute scares. We quickly adapted to the cruise lifestyle, lounging around and drinking drinking DRINKING! The ports of call were as I imagined they’d be. Aside from Hemingway’s house and some assorted stops here and there, Key West seems like one big happy hour, by 2 o’clock we were suffering from heat exhaustion so beer was the last thing on our minds. Cozumel was the second stop on the drunk americas tour. I felt like i was in the middle of George Lopez’s comedy act, I couldn’t help but think of him while we were walking through the plazas “My fren my fren, looka mira, you like belts?” The pressure was on for the vendors because our boat was the first one that had docked at the port in 40 days, the Governor of the region was there and so were the local media. Cozumel was definitely worth while, we took an educational tour/Hiking tour through the Mexican desert in San Gervasio,Cozumel learning about Mayan culture. Apparently honeymooners have been making pilgrimages to Cozumel since Mayan times, according to our guide the site at San Gervasio was the stop all newlyweds made in order to pay respect to the fertility gods. Our third stop was Belize City in Belize, like Cozumel we made another educational tour. We toured another Mayan site and we really enjoyed ourselves. What we learned (aside from the obvious educational stuff) chubby people shouldn’t hike especially in a tropical climate. Meanwhile, ON THE BOAT! we ate our weight in steaks,lobster, chicken and deserts. And back on land I developed an inner ear infection when I got back, not to fun when the room spinning but your sober.
Next Obstacle, finding and moving into a new house
it's interesting to read these old posts and how I'd regarded my MS
