Over the past few days I’ve been receiving numerous messages by text, email and in my letterbox from the Ministry of Health telling me that getting a COVID-19 vaccine is an important step I can take to protect my kaumātua and whānau from the effects of the COVID-19 virus. The message states that at this … Continue reading The Covid Vaccine and Auto-Immune Disease
I watched a You Tube TedTalk this morning entitled What Happens When You Have a Disease That Doctors Can’t Diagnose. It is presented by Jennifer Brea who suffers from ME (Myalgic encephalomyelitis), also known as CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome). A link to this video can be found here: Click here This woman’s plight really resonated … Continue reading Lost in a Medical Wilderness
I felt truly awful the day after writing my previous post. My legs felt like lead and although I needed to get some things from town, I didn’t feel confident driving the car. Since I live on my own, I began to feel a bit worried in case I fell over and no-one except my … Continue reading Seeing Things Differently
My Pharmac funding was approved and I’m now in my fifth week of taking a Biogen manufactured drug called Tecfidera. I started on one 120mg tablet per day and have gradually increased it to the point where I’m now taking two 240mg tablets daily which is the maximum. The active ingredient in Tecfidera is dimethyl … Continue reading Drugs, Drawbacks & Discoveries
I haven’t written much about my MS lately, primarily because up until about July this year it just bubbled along in the background. Always there, sometimes painful and a bit debilitating but on the whole, not causing me too much grief. I was diagnosed with MS when I was 56 which is unusual because the … Continue reading MS – Eying up the Future
It was about the time of my sixtieth birthday that my MS started to get twitchy. It was as though it were awakening after a long sleep. Neurologist visits and scans would doubtless need to be done to find out what’s at the bottom of this but I’ll write about that in future posts. For … Continue reading Working Around MS
I’ve just completed a thirty-day break from alcohol. I had toyed with the idea of doing it as a New Years Resolution but there was too much going on in January to consider it and I might have gone on postponing it indefinitely had I not heard a radio interview with Annie Grace, author of … Continue reading The Alcohol Experiment
The Back of My Mind was the title I used when I first started to write my blog about the symptoms which eventually led to my being diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis three years ago today. Vague feelings of malaise were not new to me. In my early teens I experienced a range of … Continue reading The Back of My Mind – the MindBody Connection
As hard as I try to stay positive about my MS, I have to be honest and say that the last couple of weeks have been a challenge. The problem with something like MS is that symptoms that “normal” people suffer (like my current problem which feels like a pinched nerve), immediately get filed under … Continue reading Striking a Nerve
Weirdly enough there are a lot of things that I’m grateful for about having MS and today was one of those times. My MS symptoms tell me things today that I knew before but chose to ignore in the past. And now I can’t. I know I can’t party on until the wee hours. I … Continue reading Christchurch, NZ – Friday 15 March 2019
