Sites worth seeing
In my last report I mentioned I’m attracted to all things motivational and uplifting in regards to “MS recovery”. Unarguably this is an insidious illness which, if left unmanaged (for want of a better word), will chug away – stealthily corroding our nerve sheaths and eroding our functionality. Even the relapsing remitting phase will do that, with each relapse doing unseen damage – as was the case for me for many years while undiagnosed. Then we metaphorically wake up one day and find that geriatrics at the shopping mall can outrun us, or the footpath (sidewalk) rises rapidly to meet our outstretched noses. C’est la vie .. it’s still a beautiful world and, believe it or not, we’re very fortunate – any of us – to be alive and pumping gas in and out. MS may not be the best thing to have, but (for most of us) rarely is it the worst. We’re alive, and where there’s life there’s hope .. and we have at our disposal a myriad ways of learning how we can overcome MS.
Obviously I’m in a philosophical mood today. Life has dealt us our cards, and it’s then a matter for us (with the best help we can muster) to decide how to play our hands. And if MS is a reality, it’s how we deal with it that matters – in my view at least. If you’re reading my site today or have read anything I’ve written in the past I suspect you also might agree with that. It’s against such a backdrop that I’d like to highlight today 3 sites which I’ve recently discovered and which I have no doubt will assist you on the sometimes bumpy road to recovery, or inspire you along such travels.
The first is a revised and updated site of Professor George Jelinek who I’ve mentioned previously. George as you know is a medical specialist with MS, who’s a veritable fountainhead of enormously useful and greatly efficacious information for recovery. At that new link George has updated and revised material which earlier appeared on his “Taking Control of MS” website, and taken the valuable web-resource much much further. (Incidentally I feel very fortunate indeed to have contracted MS in the modern era.) This new (”Overcoming MS”) website has additional material, new synergies with other recovery information, and some new and superlatively useful functionalities. I particularly like the Q&A page and the information on it; the ability to download and print out in glossy PDF format what you “can” and “can’t” eat on the Swank/Jelinek diet; and the printable reference pages. I’m also a great fan of podcasts – indeed the Writers’ Almanac and Canadian Broadcasting Commission’s (CBC) “Writers & Co” provide listening pleasure to help me clean the kitchen each night (my task) – and I see that the good professor has now taken to the airwaves with MS-recovery podcasts. Yeehah to that I say!
The other 2 sites I’ve stumbled across are firstly a really interesting site by an anonymous guy in the US who uses the nom-de-keyboard of Man-on-a-MSion. His mission is a worthy one .. and I like his wisdom. I’ve added the site to my favourites, listed to the right here. And lastly I draw your attention to one of the most gutsy and inspirational peace-time marches I’ve read about. This one is by an Australian blogger I know – though we live in different parts of this wide brown land. She has recently completed one of the pilgrimage routes of the Way of Saint James in Spain – hurling her “rollator” (wheeled walking frame) ahead of her. It makes great reading .. see the Wobbly Teetering blog link which I’ve also listed here.
But perhaps start with the new George Jelinek site, and bookmark it as a constant reference point for MS knowledge – my guess is you won’t be sorry.
All the best with your own recovery, KB