Diagosis Day

I know I'm jumping about all over the place. I wanted to start at the beginning, but as I've said, this diagnosis plonked itself there just when we were busy thinking that being older parents was the biggest challenge we faced. So much so that I had started a book all about older parents and why you should never be one.
This diagnosis presents fresh issues that would never cross your average yummy mummy's expensively highlighted head.. In our world modelling mini Boden and baking perfect cup cakes for the school fete comes a very poor second to wondering whether there's time for plastic surgery before the next quiz night or if you'll be doddering, ill or dead when your littlest kids graduate from university.

And yes, everything does revolve round the kids, doesn't it. On 10th September 2008 at about 10.30am I was given the diagnosis by a neurologist. I refuse to call him 'my ' neurologist in the manner of sick people who go all possessive over their medics. When I got back from the hospital I phoned my sister, who also has MS but of the relapsing remitting variety (mine is progressive - God, how scary is that?) I had already let slip to her that something was up and having awakened her anxieties (and she's not one to leave things at the hint stage) I had to tell her the outcome of my hospital appointment. But I decided not to tell anyone else for the time being. I didn't even want to tell my own husband. I think I thought that if I pulled the shell tightly enough around me, and not actually utter the words, it would all go away.
Having told my sister, I then don't want to talk about it any more. I think she feels shut out, but that's how it's going to be for the moment. My way of dealing with it.
She manages to make me laugh, though. In the same way as we refuse to shroud ourselves in beige anoraks and those Flit Flot shoes that look like Cornish pasties, we refuse to let our hair go grey (unless seriously jazzed up with highlights, as recommended by my hairdresser) and pudding bowled and wear elasticated trousers. Why does MS or any disability have to be so, well, ugly? There's nothing glamorous about adult nappies, drips and twitching in a wheelchair, but unless and until that happens, we intend to knock our own and other people's socks off.

I've just wandered round the house, thinking I ought to be doing something constructive like writing a short story for Virgin's upcoming 'Misbehaviour' collection of erotica, or putting the finishing touches to my 'literary' collection of short stories called Stabbing The Rain. I've never, since being a studious schoolgirl and Oxford student, shaken off the feeling that days should be filled with something useful like revision or planting out some rocket.
But I can't settle. I hoover. Like every frustrated writer who's just been diagosed with MS, rather than go back to my laptop I empty the dishwasher. I watch the tail end of Phil 'n' Fern and the whole of Loose Women, all discussing Victoria Beckham's cute new 'Poxie' haircut. I imagine myself on the sofa on This Morning. Actually it's always been my ambition to be on Richard and Judy. But what's my story, exactly? How it feels to get that diagnosis? How it looks, physically, to the outside world? Am I tragic enough? Am I tragic enough yet? Is it a death sentence? Am I particularly weird to be thinking about how to write about and talk about this thing to a kind of general public rather than burden myself with my own family's reactions? Yes, probably. Weird, that is.

An hour after my diagnosis, I'm at the school gate. Well, life goes on. I wonder how many people take to their beds and never get up again after hearing the words 'progressive multiple sclerosis'? It's tempting to turn my toes up and eat Kit Kats all day but I've a husband and two foreign students to feed, water, launder, take to swimming and karate (the kids, not the husband or students), not to mention a car to drive, shoes to put on, a job to walk to, legal briefs to type, and erotic short stories to write.
I walk through the crowd of mothers, buggies, kindly teachers and chattering children towards D's classroom. I'm numb, actually, not weeping or gnashing my teeth, and that's how I remain for the weeks ahead. Along the path beside the chapel, smiling at one or two mums, keeping my feet on the ground to stop from tripping. There's an invisible wispy cloud swirling round me like the grim reaper's cloak or like the cigarette smoke I gave up ten years ago. I've often read about people who've just been told they have cancer coming away from the consultant, locked inside their private cage of fear, amazed at the people, buses, even birds tweeting, as if nothing has changed. I remember feeling like that in the car going to the church on my wedding day, looking out at the people in their jeans, chatting, shopping, while I perched inside the ridiculously grand vintage Rolls, eyelashes stiff with mascara, hair in artless ringlets, tiny ivory buttons running down my back, a garter round my thigh, thrilled to bursting that everything in my life was about to change. Except the difference was it was going to change immeasurably for the better.
D bursts out of his class, hurling coat and bag at me, dashes to his brother to discuss the latest crazy bone swaps. So I wander back to the car, go home and stir fry noodles and baby corn.
But what's funny is that my friend L, who I must have greeted at school, emails me later that evening, and remarks that I looked radiant that day at school. And there was me feeling like the Bride of Dracula.
Radiant? That's a lovely way of describing a kind of reined in, hectic fear making my eyes shine, my cheeks flush, my hair toss glossily in the wind. And also, whisper it, a kind of hysterical relief, rather along the lines of Spike Milligan's epitaph: I told you I was ill. The neurologist actually said, no, you're not a hypochondriac. You are not imagining these symptoms. You are, indeed, ill.