Doing my best to ignore the banging in my head and the nausea, I tried to sit upright.
‘Good morning,’ said the Registrar. ‘Sally, do you mind if my medical student here does a brief examination?’
‘No,’ I insisted. ‘That’s fine.’
First, he got the student to look at me and asked me not to give any clues as to my condition. The student discovered the numbness ran in a spiral pattern down my back. Following this, the consultant then told the student, ‘That’s how you can assess how truthful a patient is being – they don’t know about the spiral effect.’
Great. Someone believes me, I thought.
Then the consultant – a portly, elderly gentleman in a bow tie and half-moon glasses – stepped forward. They all tried to crowd round him but there wasn’t enough room and so a couple of hapless students (the type who get into med school because they’re brilliant but don’t realise patients are people) tried to squeeze in around the curtain, leaving it gaping to the world.
I hadn’t realised I was being examined by the consultant until I suddenly found that he was addressing me.
‘… So, having ruled out various other diseases, sarcoidosis and tumours, what we’re looking at is Multiple Sclerosis, hopefully of the relapse-remitting kind.’
I looked up to a sea of faces.
‘We will discharge you for now but you will have a recall for an MRI scan that will give us final confirmation and see if you have had any other attacks in the past.’
That was it.
As a nurse I had half-expected the diagnosis yet it still came as a shock: the world slowed down. I wanted to ask a million questions but the consultant and doctors had already swept past and were onto the next bed. No information was given; there was no opportunity for discussion.
What are the implications? I silently screamed.
It was a harsh lesson and a taste of things to come. MS is an incurable disease: the medics don’t want to spend time discussing it with you. What’s there to talk about?
I was left alone and I can honestly say I’ve never felt so alone as I did then.
Everything I’d dreamt about – the travelling, excitement, the future together we had planned – ground to a halt. No dreaming of Shangri-La. Instead I faced a life stuck … with what? As I packed and prepared to leave the ward with Andrew, who had by now arrived, the nurses came up and gave me hugs. One stopped herself mid-sentence: ‘I hope you’ll get bet – … I hope things work out well for you.’
We drove home in silence. Everything looked so different: the colours were brighter. After a week’s internment in a grey hospital I had a new vision of life, its preciousness and brutality. I couldn’t halt the flood of anxieties. What if the MS hits my eyes and I can’t see or it affects my arms and I can’t hold a pen? Will I ever be able to climb another mountain again or ride a horse?
Horse riding was something I’d learned in Scotland while studying to become a nurse. I’d drive over to the stables and go cantering across the open fields; I’d come to love the sound of hooves drumming on the ground, the roar of the horses’ breath.
There were a million unanswered questions, each one scarier than the last. I was so terrified and confused. Yet, believe it or not, amid the fear and uncertainty was a feeling of relief and with it a sort of calm: the past two years had a reason. Those mysterious symptoms weren’t laziness or my going mad – they were real, very real.
As a nurse I was able to understand the physiology of the disease but I made the choice not to inform myself too much. The more I knew, the worse my anxiety would be over what to expect. The strangely reassuring news was that I had suffered other attacks, with scarring in my cerebellum (a region of the brain), which explained the dizziness and exhaustion. I could have had it for some time and not known until it felled me.
I had an image of myself, running and climbing, partying and laughing while the black net of MS ensnared me – and finally tripped me up. My thoughts turned to Andrew and his pain when he heard the diagnosis, his utter devastation, and I knew that I would have to be strong for us both. The uncertainty of what lay ahead, the sense of imminent loss, was extremely hard.
It was also very hard for Andrew.
Andrew is a very centred person; he never complains. I kept apologising: I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. If you’d known about this, you wouldn’t have married me.
‘There aren’t “what-ifs” in marriage,’ he told me. ‘I married you and that includes in sickness and in health – no one knows what that involves.’
I felt horribly guilty but Andrew was tremendous: he got me through it all by being so calm and loving. Later on he confessed he hadn’t known what to do. At lunch-times when I was back at the hospital having more tests, he would find a quiet church somewhere in the city to pray. Our best man, a lovely man called Adam who used to work nearby, came to see me.
‘Can you look after Andrew?’ I asked. ‘It’s harder for him than it is for me – he’s the one watching the illness.’
Back at home my fear wasn’t helped by the bombardment of contradictory advice. My GP advised lots of exercise and less sleep. Meanwhile, the MS Society sent more leaflets with news of handrails and catheters, which in retrospect was entirely unnecessary. More useful would have been day-to-day guidelines such as to be careful when taking a bath. I ran a bath and got in, scalding myself, because I couldn’t feel the temperature. The things I had always taken for granted had now vanished: my entire life would need to be reassessed.
I called my friend – a doctor, who was also one of my bridesmaids – to tell her that I’d been diagnosed with MS. She said her boyfriend had died paragliding the previous week; I felt guilty for feeling self-pity. I then heard that one of my other friends who was also training to become a health visitor had been diagnosed with Stage 3 ovarian cancer and another fellow student was to have a lung/ heart transplant as her cystic fibrosis had worsened.
So, I was the lucky one.
The good news was that the summer of 1990 was a great one for lying on the sofa. Martina Navratilova won her ninth Wimbledon and Gazza wept as England was knocked out in the World Cup semi-finals by Germany. I had the windows open and Jet (my therapy pet) beside me, keeping me company. During this time, I slept a lot. Trying to adjust to the constant pain and the strange sensation similar to having cotton wool wrapped around my legs brought a mire of emotions and confusion. What I knew was that MS doesn’t get better – in fact, it just gets worse as the condition is incurable – but I didn’t have a clue what to do.
Just then I was happy to be home with Jet.
For ages I’d had my eye on the empty greenhouse next door. After the MS attack our neighbour, a kindly old gent, offered me the use of it. He even created a little gate in the fence to make it easier for me to enter. Now I grew thousands of tomatoes – we had to buy a freezer to store them all. I also cultivated flowers from seeds in a desire to nurture and feel closer to nature.
In the October my Aunt Pat and Uncle Andy arranged for us to rent Pat’s parents’ apartment in the Canary Islands and also to borrow their car. I fell and ripped my leg to shreds on the volcanic rocks but it didn’t hurt because I still had no feeling.
So that was OK then, I remember thinking. After all, there was no point in crying. Retaining a sense of humour was crucial and was to bolster me in my darkest hours.
As soon as I was able to resume work, I began a new job as a health visitor in Lewisham. I was perfectly candid about my MS with the staff – I didn’t hide my condition from anyone. Besides, I’d had to delay the probation period as I was still in hospital when I was due to start. Luckily, I’d