“Things have been a little complicated here. I have been a little buffeted. Not all has been bad, and in fact plenty has been good, not least the support of a lovely woman who is unconscionably younger but shares my famed sense of humour.
I discovered last year some time that my devilish brain has been slowly eating itself for some years, without asking my permission to do so. The doctors tell me I have MS, and I have no reason to disbelieve them. Nowadays, it feels like I am walking on soft mossy ground even when I know the ground is as hard and non-giving as an Englishman, and I have problems pronouncing certain words and remembering others. I have been getting used to all the prodding and poking and tests and weird confusion over the massive uncertainty that MS entails. I’m on medication, the symptoms have eased for the moment, I am more positive than I have been for some time. Which is nice.
I told my family last month. My eldest brother expressed pleasant surprise, saying he had been sure that he would die first, and another mentioned the various conditions that other family members had, and how we all have to cope with pitfalls as we get older. The first was deflecting with humour, the second was genuinely sympathetic, and I took them as such. The second, in fact, was quite a profound nudge into being more positive. The thing about uncertainty is that it is the uncertainty itself that disconcerts; and just as I am uncertain about how bad things could get, I am equally uncertain about how well they could remain.”
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