Over the past few weeks, I have come across two people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis--one in the real world and one in the virtual world. The first is a friend of a friend and the second is an Indian journalist whose column I read today. In the first case, the woman woke up one morning and couldn't move her legs. She now moves around in a wheelchair.
The news had a special poignancy for me because I remember that in one of my health anxiety phases about nine years ago, I feared that I had MS, which is an auto-immune disease, where the body attacks itself. At the time, to my anxiety-addled mind it seemed like a slow-death sentence. Now, it turns out it doesn't have a huge effect on life expectancy, except in severe cases. None of which is to say that it is not a horrible life-changing disease. Our bodies are our abodes, our sanctuaries, and we take them for granted, just as we take home for granted. So having your abode become a stranger to you is a profoundly disquieting experience. Even though I have had demons dance in my head, I fear physical conditions more than mental ones even if such a mind-body distinction is possible to make in practice.
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