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.