MS-thief of memories

I want to just vent a little on how hard life with MS is. You see they never truly tell what MS is going to do to a person because they don’t actually know, it is a snowflake disease meaning it is so vastly different from person to person. 

Well lately I have noticed what MS is taking from me and I am devastated by it. 

It is taking all my memories, not just some here and there like it has been in the last few years but it is now taking large chunks of time from me. I wake up every day and try to remember my past and I am only now getting short blips and clips of events in my life. My memories are fading faster than I can make them at the rate it is going now.

 I can have a conversation with someone and the next day I am doing well to remember that I talked to them. So, if this you, and I seem flakey or what not, I am sorry, it is not you, it’s my dumb MS riddedled brain. I know some of this can be equated to aging but I can tell the difference btwn normal aging and MS, this is all MS. 

What is the saddest to me is that I am losing memories of my dad from my childhood and into early adulthood and memories of all my grandparents, who are gone too. 

I have what I call spotty memory of my childhood and early adulthood now, most of what I have is memories that I’ve talked about a lot, or have seen pictures of. If it has not been mentioned in great detail or pictures made of it then I don’t have that memory other than maybe on a good day of blip of it in tiny detail. 

MS is such a cruel disease anyways but the way it effects memory is criminal. I wish I had been warned at the start of this horrible journey that this was a possibility, then maybe I could have prepared better, I could have written down memories I wanted to keep, made videos of people I love just to have their voice on tape so I don’t lose that too. 

No one really tells you that hard outcome because no one wants to admit that it can do so much damage, everyone wants to tell you the best outcome so you hold onto that, well someone should have warned me so I could prepare even if it never happened to me. So now I am sharing my journey with those that are newly diagnosed so they can prepare just in case, I don’t wany anyone to be in this place. 

I am so thankful for my husband because he has almost a photographic memory and he can always remind of what I talked with someone about, what we watched, certain memories we have. I have recently dumped a ton of memories onto him from my childhood that I remembered in a quick blip one day. He didn’t know me then, but he is my safe guard for them now. 

So, if you know someone with MS or any other autoimmune diseases that effects the brain, tell them to write down, record their memories as a safeguard just in case because you never truly know how these diseases are going to affect someone. 

If I ask you a few times to tell me the same story or the same thing over and over, be patient as I am trying to hold in the memory to make it stick, and can dump it to my husband later or write it down so I will have it when my memory fails me. 

So, as I deal with this, I am finding that more and more of memories are fading and voices are no longer being able to be recalled, my heart breaks because those are things that I thought I’d have forever and didn’t make a genuine effort to record, now I regret that so much. 

MS is such a thief of so many things and no one warns you that what actually is going to hurt the most is not the physical you have to deal with but the emotional that comes with the disease.