the w's

03 Sep, 2025

I posted about my Relapsing Remitting MS on Mastodon recently, relating how I describe how I am that day when J messages me from work in her lunch break.

"I have been for my longer walk, still suffering the weak and wobblies."

Generally, J and I communicate how I am with a shorter W word slang for my various MS symptoms, rather than the proper medical terminology. Mainly because I can't say half of them. And certainly can't reliably spell them, even if I do remember them.

I go with shorthand words in different combinations – the weak, wobblies, whoopsies, weary, wees, and weepies – 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 is if you actually stop to 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 though. I'm brought back to what is my normality quite quickly, and the walking stick is then a genuine requirement again – often during 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 amplified - and 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 the patience to type – on a phone keyboard – an explanation about my fine motor control, proprioceptive and vestibular systems being affected by attaxia to describe the fact that walking is hard and I keep stumbling, or dropping my walking stick or the dog's lead due to dyspraxia, when I can just use our shorthand?

"Yeah, I've got the wobblies and whoopsies today."

So it's weak for musculoskeletal issues, weary for the crushing fatigue episodes, wees for urinary stuff creating difficulties (you do not want details), and weepies for the sudden depression and emotional sensitivity 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 and also knocking five other things over) is the whoopsies and wobblies.

There are more symptoms of course – the mental fogs, the slurred speech, the localised random pains (on top of the regular ones) – but the w terms cover the main ones that J needs to know about when we're not together and she can't see or hear directly.

I've been using the slang so long now that I had to go off to the MS Society website to refresh my memory about how the issues are described with the proper long words again.

I'm sure I should probably learn a few of them, just in case I have to explain, in the language a doctor can understand, exactly what I mean by "Yes, I've recently had an increase in the weak and wobblies."