What’s with that bandaged apple, anyway?

I suppose I should’ve written about this earlier.

Allow me to rewind a little bit.

Hi. I’m Cat. I was diagnosed with MS in the summer of 2013, shortly following my 29th birthday. In those first 29 years, I’d managed to avoid broken bones, overnight hospital stays, stitches, allergies, and surgery, so it was a little foreign when, after a couple months of strange tingling and numbness on my left side, I suddenly found myself being passed from doctor to doctor, being poked and prodded and poked some more. I had my first set of MRIs. I had a lumbar puncture (spinal tap) and was bed-ridden for the following week. I saw multiple specialists and tried several treatment plans. I was overwhelmed and completely lost.

However, a friend offered a few words of encouragement to me–before the official diagnosis and just before heading through the gauntlet of doctors and medications–that helped me find clarity in some real moments of darkness and confusion. She–we’ll call her Granny Smith here–had been living with MS for several years and was also diagnosed at a young age, so she was one of the first people I told when I was having some weird symptoms.

In classic, proud Greek fashion, she reminded me that the word “sclerosis” stems from the Greek word for “hard”–or for our purposes here, “scars.”

Multiple sclerosis. Multiple scars.

Lesions. On my brain and spinal cord. She told me that these lesions were like bruises on an apple. She said while you may have to be a little more careful with the apple to avoid additional bruising, there’s nothing wrong with the apple itself. It’s still edible. It’s still delicious. The apple is still an apple.

It’s only a bruise.

And that bruise cannot stop that apple from doing apple things.

So, there’s the origin story of the name of this blog, as well as my Walk MS Team (more on that soon) name for the past three years. I hope it makes more sense now. 🙂

So…get on with your apple-y self! Do those apple things! Have a wonderful week, everyone!

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