Reflections from the front line: Home for 3 weeks and still sorting papers

So I’m back home.

Four months’ worth of bureaucracy lay in front of me. In truth, quite a wodge had grown before I went into the hospital. Hey, I hadn’t been well in the months leading up to my hospitalization late last year.

Thankfully Saint Jane — my wife, who was christened with that name by regular reader Wendy Roe Hovey — had spent some of those four months tidying my bedroom/office. It was more than a mess.

Cardboard boxes had proliferated under my desk like I was some kind of hoarder. Maybe I was — I am. Maybe that’s what a hoarder is — someone who always means to sort things, just never has the time.

I’d also become a fire hazard.

In my defense, your honor, like so many other multiple sclerosis (MS) incidents, I’d been forced into it overnight.

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The robotic loop

My new bedroom had just been semi-prepped. A hospital bed was even installed the day before! The idea was that I’d have time to move in slowly. Except I got home after my regular one night a week of work as a director and producer — this was somewhere around five years ago, and I was still just about in showbiz, darling — and tried to make it up the stairs to go beddy-bye and realized I couldn’t do it. And I never did again. The upstairs of my house disappeared from my life.

Sorry this has all gotten a touch maudlin. I think I’d better take a break and see if I can’t cheer myself the ______ up. (That was possibly one of those naughty, naughty swear words. I really have no idea, your honor.)

Right. I’ve now slept on it. Let’s give this the craic.

I certainly haven’t been lazy! It took me a day just to sort files. I also entered that fugue state of hustling papers that kept falling on the floor and then searching through files that were also on the floor. Fatigue had set in. I hadn’t noticed. I kept dropping more and more. I kept picking up papers with my varied collection of grabbers and kept dropping those papers ad infinitum.

I’d gotten into the human equivalent of a robotic loop — the more I continued, the more papers I dropped. As my brain had stopped functioning, I didn’t notice. Viewed from the outside, I’d turned into a slapstick character of the silent age. The worse I made things, the more I tried to correct them. I’d never finish.

Luckily, I was finally called away to supper. That was a wasted afternoon of exhaustion.

I finally, last weekend, conquered my molehill, which is something incredibly hard to do, as the moles just make another one. In my case, besides trying to help out with home issues, medical bureaucracy keeps piling in. It dropped a doozy on me today as I was writing this very piece. Sheesh.

It’s only taken a mere three weeks to finish!

OK, seems I can’t get away from the dour state that living with multiple sclerosis often imposes. I try to find the light side, but living with MS and its effects is the raison d’être of us MS News Today columnists.

Oh, get me out of here!

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