Lemonade: not just for Beyonce

Wrapping up MS Awareness month with a look back at a life-shaking diagnosis. (Insert metaphor about lemons & lemonade)

Ten years ago, almost to the day, I was in a hospital room for a week as they performed tests to determine what was causing my dizziness and balance issues, eventually ruling out possible causes like ALS, meningitis, stroke, and a host of other diseases.

There was a spinal tap, there were MRIs, there was a lot of time spent contemplating what my life might look like, if it was—as they suspected—multiple sclerosis.

I didn’t know anything about MS. Could barely spell it. In the weeks after the news became “official,” I my mother started telling people, and as more loved ones found out about the news, I learned that I was more closely connected to MS than I was Kevin Bacon. There were family friends, friends-of-friends, even a close colleague who had kept their diagnosis private.

Back in 2014, MS didn’t have the star power it does now. This was before Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair were diagnosed or publicly sharing their diagnoses. There was Montell Williams, Richard Pryor, Jack Osborn. Terri Garr. People known, but far from my world. Also far off; the looming fear of a wheelchair.

But that wasn’t what I needed to focus on immediately. I didn’t let my mind go there.

Instead, I used the tools I’d been teaching as a meditation guide for entrepreneurs (and others with highly creative yet anxiety-prone brains) to wrangle a wild mind and focus attention where it could benefit me, and away from those enticing fear portals that could take me down a spiral. 

This practice was not necessarily easy, but having worked with my own creative yet anxiety-prone brain, I knew I needed to direct it toward a positive place. But what is positive about a MS diagnosis? 

Let me stop here to say that I wasn’t trying to put a positive spin on the whole incurable disease thing. Not even I am that much of a Pollyanna. But I knew how to move my mind. All those hours meditating wrastlin’ fears, gave me a muscle memory to look for Bright Spots and focus on that which I could control. (I can’t control the fact that my body has broken down, but what can I do about it?, she asks in the predawn light in a lonely hospital room.)

Holding on to the reigns of my wild mind with the steady grip of a seasoned cowhand (because I had no other choice…it was that or falling down a very long, deep well of despair), I realized I was pretty lucky to be diagnosed at a time when real, meaningful advances were happening in the medical treatment of the disease, compared to what the options had been even just 20 years before. These were new medications, better medications that could actually slow or halt disease progression. 

I saw inspiration there. 

And I looked beyond conventional Western medicine into Functional medicine, which was luckily gaining popularity around that time. Functional medicine looks at the health of the whole body, not just the disease and its symptoms. And if I really wanted to serve my health in a deeper way, I was going to have to make big changes: I didn’t just give up gluten, I gave up New York.

I stopped going so hard all of the time. I stopped just about everything.

I reinvented my diet (with help from The Wahls Protocol, which was released the same month I received my diagnosis….talk about a bright spot) and I reinvented my lifestyle.

People sometimes comment that it must have all been so hard.

Sure.
I guess it was.
But I was blinded in my determination.

Because when you’re at that moment, when there’s nothing else but you and the will to survive, you do everything you can to make sure you do.

To everyone finding a way to show up, even when it feels as barebones as bare knuckled survival, know that you’re doing it. Those days when we’re in the gutter of our mind or body—you’re still doing it. And that’s pretty amazing. You’re pretty amazing.

xx M

From the Archives

People have asked if I have a ready-made list of tips for facing a new diagnosis, and it occurred to me—I DO. In print, even.

After seeing this 8-second video on my old YouTube channel, the editor of a magazine found in doctor’s offices, Health Monitor, contacted me for a profile on my approach to living and thriving with MS. If you want to read the whole piece, on both desktop and mobile you’ll be able to click the images and zoom in on the text. (Or maybe you’re not like me, not over 40, and don’t need extreme magnification.)

And if you feel like poking around to see what I was talking about in the early days of my diagnosis, take a stroll through Thrive with MS.