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Life with multiple sclerosis

Don’t Tase Me

“Don’t tase me bro!”

Unnamed UF student 2007(?).

    Epiphany. That word was once the bane of my existence. Back when I was a SOTIC instructor, I was at the range every morning an hour or two before the students, setting up the steel targets and repainting them as needed. It never failed. About 20 minutes before the students began to arrive, the senior instructor would take a sip of coffee, look out over the range, and announce, “I have an epiphany! Followed by something like, “let’s move all the targets and paint every other one with evenly spaced stripes.”. The other junior instructors would challenge me to put a sedative or something that caused explosive diarrhea in his coffee, but eventually, we’d either do it, talk him out of it, or threaten a mutiny. I have tried not to use that tainted word since then, but recently I’ve had an epiiiiiii……an epiiiiii…….a bright idea of my own, so I’ll share it. 

    I was tased once. Most people that know me are not surprised by this. Just by the “once” part and even more surprised when I tell them it was voluntary. I went to a sort of driving course that tased and pepper sprayed students to expose them to the sensations of…….. getting tased and pepper sprayed. I would have refused, but the opportunity to drive fast, crash, and otherwise abuse cars that weren’t mine was too good to pass up and so, midway through the course, I found myself shirtless, held up by one fellow student and shot in the back with a taser by another. It’s not like touching an electric fence, or grabbing the wrong 2 wires under the hood of a car. Every muscle in your body locks up and you stand there, back arched, and make vowel sounds; mostly eeeeeeee and oooooooo, as I recall. You’d probably shout them out, but you’re limited to whatever air you had in your lungs before the barbs hit you, so you make do. When it ends, you collapse to the ground numb, not really feeling it when they pull the barbs out. It takes a second to collect your thoughts, see clearly, and get your muscles to respond to your will. 

    And…..that’s what my worst moments with MS are like. Fuzzy, non-linear thoughts and vision, muscles that don’t respond, numb body parts, and having to concentrate to get enough air in to complete anything more than a 5 word sentence. 

    It’s not a great example. Only people who have been tased get it and I don’t/can’t recommend tasing people even if you really, really want them to understand.  MS is really hard to describe to people, so I was glad to have this epiphany to share, even if the audience is small. Fatigue deserves a post all it’s own, so we’ll cover it later on.

4 replies on “Don’t Tase Me”

Good article brother. Diagnosed in 2017 with PPMS and good to read your blog. Are you in PVA?

I’m not in PVA……..yet. A rep at the VA gave me an application and I just haven’t filled it out yet. If there was a way to type sheepishly, I would.

Just came across your blog, I was diagnosed with MS in 2016 (after 10-15 years of being told I was “depressed). I’m not a vet but my dad is. Thanks for sharing your experiences. MS is one of those things that’s hard to explain and even when I try I still don’t think people totally get it or even believe me.

Hi Emily, thanks for the comment. There’s a lot of MS “inspirational” quotes out there that make me cringe, but one that I like (or at least find less cringey) is, “You have to get it to get it”.
It’s not perfect by any means because your MS still isn’t anyone else’s MS. Your pizza has ham and pineapple on it and mine has italian sausage and jalepenos. Your pizza isn’t my pizza but it’s still pizza so we at least have some basis for describing it to a fellow pizza eater. Describing it to someone who has never had pizza is a different story.
Your 10-15 years before getting a diagnosis is all too common. It’s not as though they send you to a MS specialist right away so you still end up trying to describe pizza to people who have never seen it.

“It was like round bread with tomato sauce, meat, and cheese.”

“So, you ate a loaf of bread?”

“What? No, the bread is just part of it.”

“That sounds like spaghetti. I have a patient who has spaghetti.”

“There’s a similarity or two, but no, that’s not what I’m describing at all.”

“Well, let’s get you tested for spaghetti and we’ll go from there.”

Not the best example and now I’m hungry.

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