evanmorris.com

Been there

Very good description of ms locomotion problems.  I found myself stuck this way in a the soup aisle of Krogers a few weeks ago, unable to do more than weakly shuffle out to the car.

PatientsLikeMe - Medicine - Doctors - Computers and the Internet - New York Times

Todd Small was stuck in quicksand again. It happened, as always, on the floor of the Seattle machine shop where he worked. His shift complete, Small was making the 150-yard walk from his workstation to his car, when he realized that his left leg was sinking deep in the stuff. Though this had happened before — it happened nearly every day now — he stopped and glanced down at his feet. His Nikes looked normal, still firmly planted on the shop’s concrete floor. But he was stuck, just the same. His brain was sending an electrical pulse saying “walk,” but as the signal streaked from his cerebellum and down his spinal cord, it snagged on scar tissue where the myelin layer insulating his nerve fibers had broken down. The message wasn’t getting to his hip flexors or his hamstrings or his left foot. That connection had been severed by his multiple sclerosis. And once again, Small was left with the feeling that, as he described it, “I’m up to my waist in quicksand.”

Last updated on Monday, March 24, 2008