Acceptance
It’s election night, just like it was ten years ago. It’s also my anniversary — ten years of multiple sclerosis, ten years of hospitals and drugs and wheelchairs and hope and fear.
My battle with MS began in a busy newsroom. I was a good reporter, but given an easy and predictable state senate race to cover. The incumbent happened to be my childhood neighbor. When his cat had kittens, I got a kitten. His challenger took out papers on the last day to get his name on the ballot, but he never actually implemented a campaign strategy or expected to win. Through a series of pre-election interviews, this one-time candidate for the senate, the man who took on my old neighbor, was the last new person who would ever know me pre-MS, when I could pass for normal.
That was my last story as a staff writer, a story I never read, not even to proofread before handing it in. There was pizza and good coffee to prepare us for a long night, but there was no preparation for getting sick. There were no warning signs. Suddenly I was never the same. But no one in a newsroom gets sick on election night, and I was yet to miss a deadline at the paper. I tried to put my sickness on hold. It was supposed to go away. It was supposed to be nothing.
The first thing to go was my vision. My computer screen rippled like waves. I couldn’t really read my own notebook. I was fine and then I wasn’t. I didn’t know that more than thirty lesions had formed in my brain, another twenty down my spine. I didn’t know that I was sick or could get really sick so quickly. I was on deadline. I didn’t have time to be sick. Perhaps, I thought, I was tired or too stressed. Pain shot down one arm, then down the other. Was I having a heart attack? Stroke? I walked to the bathroom to splash water on my face. I felt almost drunk and staggered in my high heels. I miss high heels. That shouldn’t matter, but tonight, on my anniversary, it does.
I was late getting back to the newsroom. The senator had been late to his own victory party and hard to get a hold of earlier in the evening.
I felt fine. Even with my editor’s calls and the pressure to speed things up, I knew the night was out of my hands. Just before 10 p.m., the senator arrived to declare victory. I just needed to ask a few quick questions to plug the quotes into a shell story, and I was out of there.
The senator’s parents sat at a table close to the door. Remember me? The little girl you gave a cat to, the one whose mother needed to borrow a cup of sugar? I was a few years older than the senator, but back then everyone knew the neighborhood kids. I was all grown up, they said. I seemed like I was doing well. At that moment I was. I confided in them that waiting for their son made my job harder, my night longer, waiting at the Elks for a quote or two. I was always good at winning over other people’s parents. That night I was a tattletale, and the senator’s parents invited me to stop by the house anytime. It was an offer I would never take them up on. The senator would go on to defend his seat in future elections, but this would be my last election as a reporter.
It wasn’t long after getting back to the paper before the symptoms of my first MS attack started to hit. I thought I could hear the fluorescent lights humming above me, everything else was background noise. It felt like I was fading out, too. My notes didn’t seem to make sense, and pain was escalating quickly. I asked my friend to watch me walk. I struggled to make it to the printer and back.
“I think something’s wrong with me,” I said.
“You’re fine,” she said.
“I don’t want to die in a newsroom.”
“No one actually dies in a newsroom. You’re fine.”
I had been an investigative reporter, a banking reporter, a foreign correspondent following the Balkan wars. And then my final stop, a mid-size daily, breaking news, holding elected officials accountable, and two night-shifts covering crime and empathizing with the tragic plights of others. Much of my life had been spent telling other people's stories. This was my story.
Sickness is my story now. It underscores everything. Slim only knows me as sick. We’ve been together for the last four years. Over the past few days I’ve been talking about my anniversary. He already knows most of my stories, but certain ones like this one he lets me tell a few times. I’ve been sick longer than I’ve been almost anything else. I tell him I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about a decade of MS. He wraps a blanket and his arm around me, and we just sit quietly, watching votes pour in. The 2020 election is more important than that midterm election ten years ago. Democracy itself is on the line, and more delicate than it’s ever been, maybe even cracked. Slim looks tired. The election won’t be called for days, and he’s probably got an hour left in him before turning in for the night. I think, for me, it might be an all-nighter.
Ten years ago I thought about going to the hospital right after filing my election story, but didn’t want to stay up all night in the emergency room only to be told I just needed more sleep. When I got home, I kissed my sleeping son on the forehead and went to bed.
The next morning everything was worse — my bones turned into cold steel and the pain of frostbite radiated out to my skin. Burning. Stinging. Freezing. Other parts of me had gone numb. My torso was caught in a hard, tight squeeze (they call this the MS hug). My balance vanished. I was confused and scared, and I went to the emergency room.
The first doctor I saw was fairly certain I had MS even before the tests and scans. I thought he was wrong, and begged him to amputate my leg because of the intense pain. He wouldn’t cut off my leg, but he did give me morphine.
I couldn’t go home — my condition worsened and I wasn’t responding to treatment. Months went by. Doctors sent me to other doctors and other hospitals because they were running out of options. They said I had an aggressive case. That I was fighting a cruel disease. They said I might not walk again, and put alarms on my bed so they would know if I tried. They said I wasn’t going to be the same person who suddenly disappeared in one night — election night.
I was losing pieces of myself. One doctor said I would go through the five stages of grief and miss myself for a long time. She left literature about MS at the foot of my bed. I threw it away without reading it.
It’s very hard to lose the abilities you once had but never thought about. At my best, I have to think about every step I take. At my worst, I can’t even stand on my own. My right leg can’t feel temperature. My left hand shakes. My eyes twitch and I see double sometimes. Pain doesn’t go away, not really ever. My bones are cold steel.
I’ve revisited the stages of grief many times, but acceptance was just not a place I’ve ever wanted to go. It sounded like defeat. And I fought so hard and for so long over the years that I was never willing to really let go of the person I had spent my whole life becoming. Acceptance meant I was never coming back. Acceptance meant I was someone else — a sick person, getting sicker. How could that be me?
My memories feel like they’re on repeat. Tonight is ten years ago. A night when I passed on the pizza and typed with one finger. A loud night in the newsroom with impatient editors and the police scanner going off one desk over. A night that was considered important, but for all the wrong reasons. I left my desk a mess, with extra hair ties in my top drawer.
Watching the 2020 election coverage with a man I love, I search for my old story, my last story, a story that doesn’t matter, the first moments where MS started to hit me. According to my article, a few towns over at the Elks Lodge, a senator was celebrating his reelection. In another small town, his challenger was making sure his kids didn’t eat too much Halloween candy. It’s all right there in my story that has taken me ten years to read. Ten years to accept the results of that night.
Andrea Gregory holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her fiction has appeared in The Sun and Consequence Magazine, with a story forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly. She is a former journalist and world traveler, having spent time reporting from the Balkans after the wars. Her work from the Balkans has appeared in Transitions Online (TOL), Balkan Insight, The Christian Science Monitor, and other places. She holds a BS in journalism from Emerson College. Her journalism career ended when she came down with multiple sclerosis, but life has a way of calling writers back to their roots.