Fall Down, Get Up Again
— John Connor

It’s 4 a.m. and, unsurprisingly, I’m laying flat on my back. Yesterday, I had a whale of a time and now I feel like a beached one. I’m not in my own bed…

In my angst-ridden teen years, I wrote poetry. It was truly dreadful and should have disappeared in the wash of personal history. Luckily, it was the mid-’70s, and in those pre-internet days,…

Shooting the breeze after work has been part of my professional life for 27 years. We’re all winding down, yes, but I’m actually still working. New ideas, niggles, gossip are thrown together over…

Hypochondria grabs, and it’s very difficult to shake. I spent the past three days eliminating potential reasons for struggling more than usual. Hopefully, it was a urinary tract infection (UTI) that was causing…

The weekend should have started on Friday. My sister-in-law is over from France and there was the first gathering of the clan in a local hostelry. I took the sensible option of…

It was one of those mornings the day after, when I was moving like a zombie before they became ubiquitous. The night before had been my 30th birthday ― I was now an…

  About 10 years ago, in the days before my MS, I had a whole raft of self-imposed jobs. As a new age man, one of these was doing the washing. Yes, this…

It looks like a dog’s leash, but it isn’t. I put in “dog’s lead” and “disabled apparatus” into my first Google search and fittingly was taken down into a rabbit’s warren of equipment…

I was going to write about something else, then my MS got in the way. Intellectually, I know MS is very up-and-down, but often when the down hits, I think the worst…

And so the good news is that if you have MS, then you can get an enhanced annuity in the United Kingdom. That is a higher payment for the rest of your life…

Another of those things I was never warned about. Maybe if I’d been assigned a local MS nurse at the beginning of my diagnosis, then eruptions out of my pants could have…

I was going to write about something else this week and then … I got STONED! Those aren’t words I thought I’d ever write. I’d been a kid during the 1960s, but…

It was a government letter; I opened it with due trepidation. A call for jury service, so not bad news and a chance to do my civic duty. But at this point I…

Having not stood on a stage and attempted stand-up for some 30 years, I’m not in the habit of writing jokes for myself. Obviously, these days, I’d be a sit-down comic anyway,…

As I write, I’m pain-free. This is important, but not for the obvious reason. I’m pain-free and can walk — or at least stumble — about as best as I’ve been able to…

It’s been an incredibly bad few weeks, so I’m not surprised that I spent recent days wondering if I had incurable liver disease. Living with chronic illness, plus the internet, plus now justifiable…

In my youth, I hitchhiked the breadth of North America ― Canada, from east to west. I had 16 first cousins in the country and only my parents back at home. My quest…

After 10-odd ― indeed, increasingly odd ― years, I presumed I’d become something of a gnarled hand at MS. If you read about something on practically a daily basis, you begin to think…

It's Wimbledon fortnight. The tennis signifies it's the height of the British summer. You usually can tell it's an English summer because it rains for two weeks. Not this time. It's baking hot and the hallowed grass can't handle it! If U.S. President Donald Trump is right and there is no such thing as climate change, the least he could do is supply the All England Tennis and Croquet Club with the formula for his resilient head of hair. Everything thrown at him does seem to just bounce off. It would make the perfect surface for these changing times. And what has this to do with MS? Well, it seems I've turned into Maria Sharapova. And, no, it has nothing to do with drugs or a penchant for wearing ultra short skirts! John Connor & Sean Meo having a smashing time. A friend was over who hadn't seen me in my natural habitat, i.e., at home, for a long while. "Is all that noise normal?" she asked my wife, "Is John in any trouble?" "No," my wife tersely explained, "That's what he's like these days!" I've found that heaving my lumpen carcass around is aided by a cacophony of grunts and groans. I can hear that it's not pleasant, but it is completely involuntary. I could move without making noise, but the sheer concentration needed would take mental resources away from maintaining balance. All pride goes before falling over! I live just a few miles from Wimbledon, but the only advantage this usually gives me is the knowledge if it's raining here, it's about to rain there. As a tennis nut, I can then get on with something else rather than watch it on TV. Getting tickets, unless you're willing to camp out in a queue for days, is nigh impossible. That is, it was, until I entered the wheelchair tennis fraternity. Somehow, I ended up on a database that puts me in a regular ballot for tickets. Don't get to go every year, but, hey, that's a lot better than not going at all! And last week, I was fortunate to get Centre Court tickets. If it had rained, unlike the other courts, it has a sliding roof, so the tennis rolls on unabated. Instead, it was a blistering day. Luckily, the wheelchair section is right at the top. The view is still excellent, but we were sheltered from the sun by the court's permanent roof. Previously, I've been on No. 1 Court, where the wheelchair area is superb. But I'd have been in direct sunlight. Five hours of that and I'd have wilted like a vampire. The added bonus at Centre Court was a disabled toilet only a few yards away and a concessions area nearby. We could get as many Pimm's cocktails as we wanted without queuing and missing game after game. The downside is that you are now fully aware of the exorbitant cost of the things: 8.50 pounds a go! We sipped, rather than guzzled, our way through the afternoon. My carer for the day was Sean Meo, a comic with whom I've worked for some 20 years. He is the most enthusiastic tennis fan I know. He also is a fitness fanatic and correctly has a low opinion of sugar. So, yes, I had to get my own ice cream! It was cheering to be physically close enough to get to the concessions area so that I could. The real bonus came at the beginning of the day. To get into Centre Court with a wheelchair, we had to go via the players entrance. The guard on the door said we had to wait five minutes because an "old lady" was coming down in the lift. It was Thursday of the first week; it couldn't be the Queen. We were only feet away from the "old lady" when she emerged, and she's aged well. It was Roger Federer.

I’ve been considering writing about the fun, fun world of catheters. As this column is morphing into some sort of diary, let’s deal with this week’s medical procedural drama. Welcome to UTI…