Believe it or not, I was young and foolish once. Now, I’m just ol…..ol….. not quite as young, and foolish. One out of two isn’t bad, right?
Thanks mainly to the grace of God, my various acts of foolishness were not fatal, or even very painful. My shenanigans were mostly of the playful, harmless, valuable life lesson teaching, variety. One of which I will now attempt to twist into a lesson about multiple sclerosis.
If the photo above didn’t clue you in, this lesson involves gummy bears. Not the sugar free ones. If that were the case, even though I’m sure there’s many a valuable lesson there, I wouldn’t be (as) inclined to share. Not sure what I mean? Here’s a link, because I shan’t elaborate.
Back in my days of being an FO in 1st Ranger Battalion, my small detachment would often travel from our little airfield in Savannah, Georgia, to locations where we could practice our skillset. On a number of these trips, we slept out at the range but made daily trips to the nearest PX for supplies. These supplies normally consisted of caffeinated beverages, assorted junk food, and once, just once, a five pound bag of gummy bears.
There were seven of us on that trip so that worked out to just under 3/4 of a pound of bears each eaten over the course of three days. At the time, it seemed like a good, cost effective, and completely doable plan, right?
Wrong.
It turns out that no human, (keep in mind we were all in our twenties at the time), can consume that weight of gummy bears in three day’s time. By the second day, just mentioning the words “gummy bears”, would earn you a string of harsh words and a round of vigorous exercise. By the third day, we still had approximately half the bag and were flicking them at road signs, etc on the long drive home.
We were young, athletic, and normally could eat so much that buffet owners locked their establishment’s doors and hid in fear. However, when it came to vast quantities of gelled corn syrup, we apparently did not know our limitations.
Do you know yours? Do you abide by them? For me, living within the limitations brought on by MS is the harder and maybe more important part. Maybe that’s because in order to live within those limitations, we have to admit that they exist; both to ourselves and to others.
Once that’s done, the burden to work around and/or accomodate those limitations falls on everyone involved. Your real friends won’t mind, but they might look to you to admit you need an accomodation before offerring one.
Multiple sclerosis, because it is consistently inconsistent, complicates this by making my limitations different than they were this morning, yesterday, last week. That can make knowing and admitting to limitations extra hard. Doable, but hard and I’m not always successful.
If you have the perfect solution to adapting to a constantly evolving set of limitations, let me know, because, while it isn’t exactly a five pound bag of gummy bears, it is hard to swallow sometimes.