Coping
with MS can be a challenge, after we
are first given the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis.
Learning to live life again can
be difficult depending on how severe your disability has become because
of the effects of Multiple Sclerosis on the nervous system and on our
overall health.
After
we are first given the diagnosis of
Multiple Sclerosis, it can sometimes be difficult to cope
with how devastating the effects of
Multiple Sclerosis can be on our overall health.
Depending on how
mild to severe your particular set of MS symptoms
have become, you may have to give up doing many of the things that did
previously because your body no longer functions enough for you to be
able to do the things that you really enjoyed before Multiple Sclerosis
entered your life.
I
know how it feels to have to give up doing the majority of what I loved
to do previously - almost over night - because of how severe my
particular case of Multiple Sclerosis was when I was first given the
diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. I
didn't realize at the time that the very mild symptoms that I
had as my initial symptoms of
Multiple Sclerosis,
within the 2 years before I was actually diagnosed with MS, were a much
more severe health condition than I could have ever imagined.
After I was first
diagnosed with a severe case of Multiple Sclerosis, I could have been
very depressed, after all, Multiple Sclerosis was very fast acting in
my case and my life turned upside, almost litterally over night.
At first I had decided that no matter what the doctors told
me that I wanted to get back what Multiple Sclerosis had taken away
from me. I wanted to be able to live life again, without
having to rely on other people to do many things for me each day that
we take for granted that we can do for ourselves, until we are not able
to do many of these things for ourselves.
Because I chose, at
first, to make it my mission to do what I could to give other people
hope, in spite of what I was going through at that point, the doctors
labelled me as "being in denial". I didn't deny the fact that
because of how quickly my situation had become a very severe case of
Multiple Sclerosis that I was very sick. I didn't deny the
fact that I could no longer walk, when I was diagnosed with Multiple
Sclerosis. But for me to get better, I decided
early on that no matter what else happened that I could not give up
hope for my drastic situation to be able to improve.
Because of how I
chose to cope with my own situation, I was
constantly
being asked, by doctor, nurses and anyone else that was araound me, how
I could handle the drastic changes that Multiple had
brought into my life.
Thinking
back on it all now, I had decided that I had 2 choices at the time.
I could either allow myself to be extremely depressed (which
would not help me to get better at all) or I
could find a way to deal with the way that I felt inside.
I
had remembered that in the past, before I was diagnosed with Multiple
Sclerosis, that I
decided right after I was
given the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis that in the past I had used
the adversity in my own life to help me to keep from giving
up, instead of giving me an excuse to give up on me. Most
people couldn't undestand any of how I was reacting, since at times,
things could have been so very upsetting or even depressing for me, if
I let it all get to me.
I'll
give you an example of what I am talking about. When I was
first diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, I was reacting so badly to
heat that I felt like I was on fire much of the time, the room kept
spinning on me most of the time and I felt like passing out whenever
they put me in a room that was too warm for me to handle when I was in
the hospital, the first time. Going for therapy was very
difficult for me to do at all, but what I did was comical to everyone
else around me.
I
had been to physical therapy a few times in my life for more minor
things, before I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and I always
enjoyed going to physical therapy and working with the therapists to
help whatever was wrong at that point to get better.
So
I approached physical therapy like it was "fun time". One
thing I didn't understand about Multiple Sclerosis, when I was first
diagnosed, is that when you have Multiple Sclerosis (especially a
severe case), anything and everything that you do makes you very
exhausted because of the MS fatigue problem.
Before Multiple Sclerosis entered my life, I had the attitude that I
worked hard and I played hard. I was either "all on" or "all
off". I was pretty high strung most of the time growing up. I
normally had to physically wear myself out to go to sleep (before MS),
but that wasn't the case after I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.
I
was in the hospital for 6 weeks the first time, when I was diagnosed
with Multiple Sclerosis. I was in the Intensive Care Unit the
first week, until it was determined that I had Multiple Sclerosis.
Then I was sent to the rehabilitation floor. I laid
down for 10 days before I was sent to rehabilitation therapy.
Because of lying down for 10 days straight, I had problems
standing up without gettting very dizzy from my blood pressure dropping
whenever I tried to stand up. To get me used to standing
again, I was placed on a "tilt table" each day for at least 30 to 60
minutes and the angle of the table was increased each day to get my
body used to standing again. I was also given all kinds of
nifty gadgets and "therapy toys", as I called them to get different
parts f my body used to functioning again.
I
had so much fun in therapy that some of the other patients would just
sit and laugh at me and not do their therapy. One of the therapists,
that I talked to a lot told me about this happening every time I was at
therapy. I found out that the people that laughed at me the
most were people that just didn't want to do their own therapy at all.
So I suggested to the physical therapist that they
rescheduled the patients that didn't want to do therapy to come down to
therapy 15 minutes before I left therapy and just let them sit there
and laugh at me for 15 minutes. I always thought of laughter
as "good medicine" and I thought that this would help the patients who
were too up tight about doing their therapy to relax so that they would
be able to do their own therapy more easily. I asked the
therapist if this helped get these patients to do their therapy and the
therapists said "Yes it did!"
I
found that helping making other people laugh calmed me down too.
This helped me to feel like somehow everything was going to
be okay when I was in the hospital and I was still so sick at the
beginning.
Coping with MS and coping with Multiple Sclerosis depression, and everything that goes
along with having the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis can be difficult
at times. I'm not saying it is easy. I found it
much more difficult to cope with MS, after I returned home from the
hospital and it began to sink in how sick I was and that this was more
of a "long-term illness" than anything else I had ever experienced
before.
Finding
ways that help us specifically to cope with MS is the better way to do
things because how we each react to the challenges that Multiple
Sclerosis brings into each of our lives makes all of the difference for
each of us. What works for helping one person with Multiple
Sclerosis to cope may or may not help the next person with Multiple
Sclerosis to cope.
Helpful
suggests for reducing how terrible we can feel, sometimes
because of the effects of Multiple Sclerosis on our bodies, that can
help us to cope better with Multiple Sclerosis can include the
follow:
* increasing
skin exposure
to sunlight
- when the sunlight shines on the skin, our skin reacts to the sunlight
by producing vitamin D in our skin We have several parts of
our
bodies that rely on having high enough levels of vitamin D in our
bodies. Vitamin d deficiencies has strong protective
properties
in helping to prevent the occurrence of Multiple Sclerosis.
Once
MS is present, the higher levels of vitamin D are needed even more by
the body, since vitamin D helps to boost the immune system and helps to
reduce or maybe even prevent ms insomnia.
* Eliminate
Negative
Thinking and Negative Talk
- we often can have a tendency as people to
talk about ourselves and
other people in a way that is more gossipy and in a negative point of
view. This
is counter productive to helping our bodies to heal from the damage
that is often caused by Multiple Sclerosis, since whether we know it or
not - our bodies listen to every word that we say, think or hear.
Since our bodies require huge amounts of energy to heal, we
need
to do all that we can to focus positive healing energy towards our
bodies instead of draining away from our bodies the limited resources
of energy each day that we use that is desperately needed by our bodies
for hem to heal themselves.
* Allow
ourselves to Learn to Live Life Again - Join Social groups ( both
on-line and off-line)
Joining MS
support groups, finding MS
blogs, MS
forums, MS
message
boards, or MS
chat rooms
to get answers to your questions about MS
and learning how to reconnect with other people again (after being
diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis) can be challenging.
We all
need other people, whether we think we do or not. It may take
some time to learn how to live life again after Multiple Sclerosis has
changed your
life, but don't allow the Multiple Sclerosis to take away your
reasons for living and
enjoying life again.
Find ways
to get involved in living
life
again. Volunteer somewhere or join some type of social group,
just to develop new friendships and redevelop the areas of your life
where you allowing ourselves to learn how to live life again.
Other
things to consider can include:
Extreme MS
Vitamin Deficiencies
-
the medical community is finding that many cases of Multiple Sclerosis can
result in vitamin deficiencies.
More extreme vitamin deficiencies in magnesium and calcium
have been
found to increase the severity and the frequency of the appearance of
muscle
tightness,
ms
muscle spasms and
muscle cramping in the average person, but for those of us with Multiple
Sclerosis, magnesium and calcium deficiencies can cause
often much
more severe problems with ms
spasms,
ms
tremors,
or ms
spasticity.
Elevated Levels of
Heavy Metals
and other Toxins - our bodies can
be having problems with having problems with not detoxifying from heavy
metals
and other toxins as they should on a daily basis.
Many of the
symptoms of Multiple
Sclerosis can be reduced, simply by helping the body to get rid if
toxins more easily. MS
spasms, ms
twitching
and multiple
sclerosis tremors
can be reduced to a large extent by helping our bodies to detoxify
better.
* Taking
Chlorella (a
green sea algae) helps to reduce heavy metal levels in the
body, including mercury, aluminum, lead and other metals.
*
Taking a powder made from
barely grass (a green grass plant) can help to
reduce spasms, since it is higher in magnesium. Magnesium
deficiency has been found to cause leg, hand and other spasms.
MS
can set the body up for having many vitamin deficiencies because so
much of the Central Nervous System and other bodily processes are so
out of balance.
*
Taking the
herb milk
thistle can also help ease the burden on the liver to help
to
detoxify the blood better and help the liver to detoxify the body
better. Taking the herb milk thistle also helps to reduce the
amount of stress that is placed on the liver when you are trying to
increase how well your body detoxifies from toxins.
*
Taking Extra Magnesium
with Calcium (take the calcium and
magnesium in a 1 to 1 ratio or until bowel tolerance is
reached --
you take enough magnesium until your poop is starting to become softer
and more watery then you reduce the amount you are taking of the
magnesium a little to keep you from actually getting diarrhea)
Other Vitamin
Deficiencies
- because magnesium and calcium need
more of certain other vitamins to be present at high enough levels to
aid in
absorption, deficiencies in one or more of these vitamins can also
contribute
to the presence of more frequent ms
spasms. The list of helper vitamins
can include
vitamin D,
vitamin C, B complex, B1 (thiamine), B5 (Pantothenic acid), B6
(Pyridine), magnesium, calcium and zinc.
Taking vitamin
supplements can he helpful in reducing the spasms,
including taking calcium, magnesium and vitamin D, but I have found
that for my
own case of Multiple Sclerosis, taking vitamin supplement powders that
are made
from whole foods helps better than taking vitamin supplements all of
the time,
whenever the spasms and twitching become too overwhelming.
Another way of
helping our bodies to function better overall is to
grind green leafy vegetables, including kale or spinach, along with
grinding
other vegetables such as carrots and beets to help our bodies to
detoxify from
heavy metals (mercury, cadmium, aluminum, etc.).
Grinding whole foods
- especially vegetables and drinking it can
help give our bodies a boost by helping to provide a broader range of
vitamins
and nutrients that can help speed up the body with repairing the nerve
damage, that all too often can result from Multiple Sclerosis attacking
the nerves through out our bodies.
If grinding whole
foods and drinking them on a more consistent
basis over a longer period of time, this can help our bodies so much
more than
taking large handfuls of vitamins. In the long run it is also
cheaper to
buy more vegetables and fruit than to pay for vitamins and other
supplements
that are more and more synthetically made rather than being more whole
food
nutrients that are just concentrated from food sources.
Taking the green
sea algae, called Chlorella, can also help our
body to do a much better job in ridding our bodies of toxins, by aiding
our
bodies natural detoxifying mechanisms in functioning better than than
they did
before we started to take the Chlorella.
All of these
changes can help with Coping with
MS by helping with reducing how severe and
how
frequently we see the multiple
sclerosis
spasms occurring
on a regular basis, but they don't all need to be used or
done at
the same time, since some of the effects of different vitamins and
herbs can sometimes overlap in their effects on the body.
Check
with your doctor before using any herbs or vitamins to attempt to
reduce your particular symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis. Your
doctor can determine much better which vitamin deficiencies.
I
would also suggest finding and working with a doctor that has
experience using herbs to help to reduce the symptoms
of MS.
Herbs can be
harmful to your body
if taken in a combination that
your body is unable to handle -- so find an herbalist or
a doctor that is trained on using herbs with their MS patients
to
consult with before taking any herbs to see if your particular
combination
of MS symptoms make it
useful or even possible for you to take any
particular herb.
If
the proper precautions are followed when taking herbs, they can be
helpful and effective for reducing many symptoms
of Multiple Sclerosis.
