Its time to share the news......

I want you to listen now as this is very important.

A few weeks ago, I had an appoint to spend an hour with an MS nurse at the Walton Centre in Liverpool. This was arranged by my MS psychologist as until this point, no one had sat me down and talked to me about MS in general. At this point, as I entered the room, I still did not have MS, I had no diagnosis.

A few minutes into our conversation, the MS nurse got around to discussing my own situation and I explained to her all the aches and pains that have made up the vast majority of my blog thus far. We talked about my first symptoms, my initial tests, moving from private to NHS and my ongoing evaluation.

She then told me I had MS.

You will find a post here from a good few months ago where I was told by my Psychologist that I had MS and I shot her down in flames for it. This time however, this lady was serious.

I asked to see my notes and she showed me a letter taken from over a year ago to my GP following my initial consultation at the Walton Centre confirming the diagnosis.

The weird thing was, during this consultation and on from there, no one told me I had been given a diagnosis. I was very much under the impression that if a diagnosis was coming, someone would sit you down and give it to you face to face.

Who am I to argue, its official, as far as science is concerned I have MS.

I was shocked, a little traumatised but ultimately, I now had a label and in a strange way, a weight was lifted. It doesn't mean that anything changes, it just confirms what has been thought for a long time. I have always had MS, you don't progress to MS as you grow older, its what I have and its what I have had and explains a lot about all that has happened to me.

So what do I do and where do I go and what is being done to halt the course of this? Well basically nothing. Nothing changes, I carry on, I go to the Walton Centre every few months, I tell my story to someone new and if I have symptoms that are serious enough for treatment then I get treatment. Its as simple as that really.

There are still things that I can do to help myself. Better diet, lose weight, more exercise and being content in mind, body and soul helps too.

Look on any MS forum and they all have the section about "What makes your condition worse than any other thing on the planet?" One word that keeps coming back is stress. This is a word that most people wont link to me but believe me, for a great many reasons, I feel a great deal of stress about this right now and while some of it is in my control, some of it is also out of my control so its an area where improvements could be made.

I always though this post would be longer, more profound and more explosive than it has turned out to be, but there you go. I have MS so lets get on with it.