the w's
I posted about my MS on Mastodon recently, explaining how I describe how I was that day when J messaged me from work in her lunch break. I replied to her enquiry regarding the progress of my day:
"I have been for my longer walk, still suffering the weak and wobblies."
Generally, J and I communicate how I am that day with a shorter W word slang for my various MS symptoms, rather than the proper medical ones. Mainly because I can't say half of them. So, I can have the weak, wobblies, whoopsies, weary, wees, and weepies, in different combinations.
I go with these easier words to describe what sort of mix of MS symptoms I'm having that day—if they're playing up enough to be worth mentioning.
I have some symptoms every day, but they're sort of at 'normal' background level when, to borrow a Pratchett term, the embuggerance is being relatively quiet. It's kind of like your fridge humming away virtually unnoticed in the kitchen; always on and working, but you only know it's on if you concentrate enough to hear it gently whirring.
I can live relatively normally at this base level, and in fact it may be hard to tell that there is anything not right at all, apart from my use of a walking stick all the time. Even then I sometimes feel like I don't need the stick at all. In fact some days I feel so strong and healthy I question whether the MS diagnosis was wrong in the first place.
Those days tend to only occur occasionally. I'm often brought back to what is my normality quite quickly, and the walking stick is a genuine requirement again—often halfway through a walk that started off with me feeling like I didn't need it.
On a day when any of the symptoms becomes more active and is amplified - on very rare occasions is it all of them at once - they get the honour of being mentioned specifically, but with the appropriate W word. Who has time to type out an explanation about my fine motor control, proprioceptive and vestibular systems being scrambled to describe the fact that walking is harder and I keep dropping things, when I can just use our shorthand? "Yeah, I've got the wobblies and whoopsies today."
So it's weak for muscle strength issues, weary for the crushing fatigue episodes, wees for urinary stuff creating difficulties (you do not want details), and weepies for the out of nowhere depressive emotional reactions to things that would elicit nothing in particular from me at any other time. Dropping things and bashing into stuff (shoulders into door frames, failing to pick something out of a cupboard but knocking five other things out instead) is the whoopsies.
I've been using them so long now that I had to go off to the MS Society website to refresh my memory about how the issues were properly described again. I'm sure I should probably learn a few of them, just in case I have to explain, in proper language a doctor can understand, exactly what I mean by "Yes, I'm getting an increase in the weak and wobblies."
I do have two more symptoms to describe, but nothing W springs to mind to describe the speech slowing to a drawl, and the refusal of cognitive systems to work as normal. Witless?
Nah. Generally, a blank and confused look and uttering no words at all in response to the question "Would you like a cup of tea?" is all the signal J needs for that.
Written by a real person who completely ignores red wavy underlining and uses perfectly legitimate brand new words that just haven't made it to a dictionary yet. skryb
Post Link: https://skryblans.com/the-ws
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