Janie, Thanks for providing me with your ruminations tonight. They have precipitated some flights of verbiage of my own that, if I could recall the specific instances, I would tell you how many times in the last week my recent memory has failed me, how many times I fell down, how my hands feel sheathed in padded leather and prohibit my playing any instruments now. Somewhere along the line of my life, or so I've been told, my own immune system is doing ice pick lobotomies all over my brain's white matter and spinal cord. The diagnosis is MS --- finally --- !! After the l-o-n-g years of spinal surgeries for those same symptoms, finally TO KNOW is like a huge weight lifting. And the symptoms change every other day. Quite a roller coaster ride that, when one is acclimated, can be even exhilarating.

Janie---it's an adventure and a half, and they say I'm doing it to myself -- attacking my own synapses and myelin nerve insulations randomly, piecemeal. Physicality failures, cognitive diminishment, bodily functions askew and shut down.-------- We spend our life looking at our own personal variations of the thoughts you've raised in this good thread. Looking for some answers. I only seem to find myself sadly preoccupied with "ME"---flailing around, now, like a turtle in my own tale of "The Great Turtle Drive" who is over on his back in the middle of this road I was once the king of. All 4 limbs are wildly waving in the wind. My "perceived reality" you speak of is different now from the way it's always been. Who'd-a-thunk it!

As Robert Frost said in his good poem called "The Oven Bird", I find myself left, after all is said and done, pondering "what to make of a diminished thing!"

Legs waving in the wind! The wind... As Dylan said, "That's where the answers are blowing!!" Maybe. Matbe not.

I will leave this heavy stuff to you intellectuals who have the inclinations to search therein. If I am still alive when you solve all of it, please, let me know-----especially if it leads to a cure for MS... Maybe! Maybe not.

I say all of this with great respect for the ideas generated here. My tongue, and my foot,too, probably, are firmly set in my cheek--and lodged in my mouth -- respectively. For now, your good words are making my head hurt too. So, I'm going to bed!! **SMILEY FACE**

Love,

Art Thieme