In attempt to milk this infamous comment for all it's worth, I'm going to turn this into some three-party dialogue and use it as an excuse for some lame writing. As I'm sure is the case with Jackie, I would in no way discourage people from visiting this site, or commenting here. In fact it's been super exciting for both of us to read the comments and be able to sort of engage with others who are in the same boat. It's no secret, we love that people are reading this, and we love comments, no matter what sort of reaction it may be. This disease is messy, but so is life in general. We're talking about it honestly, and that doesn't mean everyone is going to agree with our individual opinions, ideas, or attitudes for that matter. I think most of us are "grown up" enough to realize this though, and I'm probably just sounding redundant now. Even though this is just the internet after all, I am with Jackie, and commend this particular reader for speaking her mind and for giving my lesion filled brain something to ponder on today.

So it was this particular sentence that got my wheels turning, "the younger your DX'd with MS, typically, the more you're in for the long run." My first reaction to this would be, "no shit Sherlock." But my point of "chiming in" here is that this sentence got me thinking about another aspect of being diagnosed young. Let's face it, getting diagnosed with a disease when you're ANY age would suck. Being a teenager or twenty-something or thirty-something however, doubly sucks. I fall into the "twenty-something" crowd, which in my particular case also puts me into the "still figuring it all out" group. I would like to add to this though, that I hope I don't get to a place when I am forty or fifty, of thinking I know it all. I would like to be constantly evolving, changing, growing, learning, what have you. That said, everyone seems to be really adamant on making sure you know that MS shouldn't keep you from doing anything you want to do, and not letting it change your plans. I like it when people who haven't been slugged in the gut with a runaway ball give you this advice. Sure, in the overall grand scheme of things, this disease is not going to change the WAY I live my life, as in what kind of human being I am going to be, but it's certainly changed a few of my plans. College is a good example. I wish I would have had my shit together and finished school say, five years ago, but I didn't. At 27, I am only halfway to a bachelors degree, and I didn't really have any huge issues with this until MS came along. I have had to re-think my plans for school. The university/major/career I had planned on are seeming less and less feasible to me with each passing day. I am now trying to figure out which ONLINE degree from a state university would be most likely to help me get a job that I could stick with through varying degrees of disability in the future. So there you go, I am indeed changing my plans for MS. The truth hurts. 

Another funny thing about being younger and being diagnosed, are the comments like "you're so lucky the doctors caught it in you so early." Again, they are generally coming at this from a place of compassion and care, and in this sense I do appreciate it. I cannot however deny that I find comments like these inwardly annoying, and now outwardly annoying via the internet. Minus some ideas about environment or viruses, we don't know how the disease develops, and according to my neurologist anyway, there isn't really any way to tell how long I have actually had the disease. What if they didn't catch it in me early, maybe I have had it for ten years and didn't know until the symptoms became such that I was able to finally be run through the gamut of tests and diagnosed. If this is the case, I would have rather started developing the disease when I was thirty, be diagnosed at forty, and started on a treatment that I was "sure" was keeping my disease from progressing. This wasn't the case with me however, and I'm not going to cry about it or anything... okay maybe I have, but not today. What. Ever. 

Life, with the addition of MS is still going to be thrilling, just slightly more messy. I for one enjoy sloshing around in puddles, but not every single day.

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