Once upon a time, in Afghanistan, I found myself with half my team, a handful of Romanian SOF, and a squad of Afghan army soldiers climbing up a narrow canyon toward a cave full of munitions. We were guided by a sandal wearing local man and his 9 year old son, both of whom outpaced us the whole way. I actually felt a little better when the kid had to hand his rifle to his father so he could use both hands to clamber up and over a boulder. When I say we were “climbing”, I don’t just mean the trail was steep. I mean, we left our body armor behind and had to occasionally help each other up rocks and cliff walls, etc. The canyon was dotted with caves and fighting positions, all cleaned out except for this one because of how difficult it was to get to. At long last we reached it after negotiating a final narrow ledge around a bend in the canyon. The ledge was just wide enough for one person at a time and was best crossed by scooting along sideways with one’s hands on the wall of the canyon for stability. This ledge will become important to the story later on.
When we entered the cave, we found a decent sized stack of 14.5mm DShK ammunition sealed in cans and 15 or 20 SPG-9 rockets*. Not a huge haul by any means, but destroying it meant that at the very least the explosives from the rockets couldn’t be used for IEDs and the ammo wouldn’t be shot at anyone. Because of the effort it took to get there, everyone was traveling light and our engineer/demolitions guy** had only carried about 10 blocks of C-4, so we stacked the ammo cans in a tall row with the rockets, C-4 on top of them, in the middle. The plan being that the rockets would be destroyed for sure and would add to the explosive force, destroying the ammunition.
Because of the confines of the canyon, all but 2 people would start the climb down to the vehicles and those lucky 2 would stay behind and set off the explosives. I had earned a reputation for being cool under fire, so I was voluntold to stay with the engineer. Unbeknownst to everyone, I wasn’t exactly cool under fire. It looked like I was calm and level headed because I was actually clueless under fire and it’s easy to keep calm when you don’t fully appreciate the danger until it’s mostly past.
While the engineer finished setting up, I did a quick test run to see how long we needed to reach a safe place around the bend in the canyon before the explosives went off and decided on 8 minutes. He cut the time fuse, ignited it as I started a timer on my watch, and we set out. Remember that ledge I mentioned earlier? We were almost to the end of it when the explosion went off. As the ledge shook under foot, the canyon wall shook under hand, and rocks began to roll down, I let go with one hand to look at my watch and then shake my fist at him.
“You said 8 minutes!!” (I may have added a little more than that, but who remembers?)
“Woah, woah. What time did it blow at dude?”
“7 minutes, 20 seconds!”
“Chill out man, that’s well within the window.”
“Window?! What Window? It wasn’t within my window!”
I should point out that he is from the northeast but talks slow and sleepy like a west coast surfer……if that surfer also happened to be from New Hampshire. Explosives guys tend to come in 2 varieties. The wild eyed, twitchy, nervous kind and the “why should I be nervous? I’ve either got this, or it’s suddenly not going to be my problem anymore.” kind. He is one of the latter.
I promise there’s a point to all this and it does have something to do with multiple sclerosis. It’s that part about being “within the window”. MS has its own window, (maybe windows), but for me, there is no “within the window”. It seems like the window is never open the same amount from minute to minute, day to day. You know, consistently inconsistent, randomly random? It makes planning next to impossible. “Hmm, the window is wide open right now, if it still is this afternoon, I’m going to go outside and do _____.”, but it’s only open an inch by then, if not closed completely. It might close if it’s too hot, too humid, I ate too much, or didn’t get enough sleep the night before. Then again, it might just close for no discernable reason whatsoever. “Go out this Friday? Sounds great! I’ll rest up so maybe the window will be wide open, but that’s still no guarantee that I’ll be up for it when it’s time”.
The solut……no, the coping strategy is some sort of combination of doing what you can, while you can and not being so reliant on plans. That’s easy for an at home, retired guy to say and I realize it, but you can’t live your life “within the window” when the opening and closing of the window isn’t really up to you.
Oh, and even if the other person has MS, well within their window is not well within yours. I can’t make one size fits all analogies about a disease that’s anything but.
*I know a SPG-9 is a recoilless gun and the rounds aren’t technically rockets, but I don’t know what else to call them.
**He has a name and is still around. He endangered my life on several other occasions including with a homemade still and a blast furnace fed with forced air from an old leaf blower. Where did that leaf blower even come from? We lived way out in the desert. Why did we have a leaf blower in the firebase?