BLACK PATENT SHOES
by EVA MARSH
Dancing With MS©
2007 ISBN 978-0-9681392-1-9
ISBN 0-9681392-0-5
My reaction to the diagnosis,
and the start of my understanding of recovery as described on pages 21-24.
EXCERPT
I cannot accept that I must be paralyzed.
I cannot accept that I must sit still
and be useless.
I cannot accept that I must stay out of
the sun.
I cannot accept that there is nothing
I can do to alter the course of the inexorable.
Maybe they can't do anything, but I will.
My reality will be different.
The reduced workload
in the lab gives me more time to spend in the medical library. Surely I'll
find some answers here. Nothing in these volumes can be more frightening
than my ignorance. So I spend the first of many lunch hours in the library
with a medical dictionary on my lap and volumes of medical journals spread
out on a study table. At the index, in the stacks, hunched over the texts
and volumes of journals, I investigate MS.
I understand practically
nothing that I read, but I can't stop. I am driven. If I read enough and
think enough about the material, surely I will comprehend something. I
make notes, send for even more reprints and finally stop shaking as I turn
the pages.
In the 1966 volume of
the journal Neurology, I found an article titled "Regeneration of myelin
in multiple sclerosis", by Irwin Feigin and Nina Popoff. By studying slides
of tissue with an electron microscope, they found evidence of myelin repair
in MS plaques of damage. The newly formed myelin is not the same as the
original myelin.
So what? It must
do the job, after all I'm walking again, and driving, and climbing stairs.
There must have been enough repair to allow me to function as before. The
paper concludes: "If ways were found to enhance the regeneration observed
in this study, a clinically useful purpose might be served."
Did I enhance the process
by making myself resume my regular activities? Is it that simple? Did the
girls enhance the process by expecting me to go on as usual? They didn't
pay attention to my right leg that scuffed or my right knee that didn't
bend properly. So I didn't either, and soon my walk was normal again.
One of the references
is a paper about the ultrastructural study of remyelination by Bunge, Bunge
and Ris, published in a 1961 journal that covers biophysics, biochemistry,
and cytology. First I reach for the dictionary and look up the word "ultrastructure":
ultrastructure ---- the structure beyond the resolution power of the light
microscope.
The abstract is pretty
straightforward, describing the detailed study of prepared tissue samples
from cats with damage like that in multiple sclerosis, for over a year
after the lesion had been caused. The first sign of myelin repair was observed
after 19 days; by 64 days all nerve damage was thinly repaired. The authors
suggest that myelin is reformed in the same way it is first formed in normal
development, but note that this does not agree with present views. Somehow
that encourages me. After all, advances are not made by people who think
the same as everybody else.
The rest of the paper
is far beyond my comprehension, but one observation stands out ---
"The neurological condition of
the experimental animal begins to improve at a time when remyelination
begins and has returned to normal by the time most axons are at least partly
remyelinated."
I'm sure that all these
kitty-cats wanted to get going as soon as possible. They did it in 64 days,
and it took me from March 17 to the middle of May. Purrty close.
