Everyone knows the saying, ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade’, well, life has donated a bumper crop to me over the last five years and I am doing my very best to transform them into something palatable.
It began in 2015 when I was diagnosed with MS following years of strange symptoms and multiple trips to the doctor.
Then, just over a year ago, I was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer.
Was life trying to tell me something? Perhaps.
Under the circumstances, it might seem reasonable to assume that my time was effectively ‘up’. What, after all, did I have to look forward to? My MS is incurable and degenerative. And, having done the research, I knew just how extensively it would strip me of my physical and mental abilities, leaving me a shell of my former self.
My cancer was caught very early and my treatment started straight away, but the odds of survival were at best around 80% even after chemo and radiotherapy. This sounds good until you turn it around. One in five people in my situation won’t make it to ten years. I was fifty-four at diagnosis, so a pension no longer seemed something to worry about.
Depressing though this might seem, I do believe that life was trying to tell me something and not that there was no point in even trying any more. Perhaps it is simply my inner optimist speaking, but I genuinely feel that it was giving me an opportunity to reevaluate everything; to see that there is, in fact, another way to live, a way that, for however long I’ve got will be more fulfilling and more valuable than the one I’ve had to leave behind.
So join me in exploring how to make the best of life with chronic illness and specifically MS.
I shan’t be preaching at you, but I would like to share any and all the things I have found that make life easier or at least more bearable.
Real lemonade, like life, is bitter sweet, but no less delicious for it.