MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS IS NO LAUGHING MATTER BUT WHAT IF IT IS?

​“THERE IS NOTHING IN THE WORLD SO IRRESISTIBLY CONTAGIOUS AS
LAUGHTER AND GOOD HUMOR”

CHARLES DICKENS
​

OUR STORY IN A NUTSHELL
When you’re sitting in a hospital waiting to find out why your 20-year-old daughter had no feeling in half of her body, nothing seems remotely funny. As Joy (my daughter) endured endless days of tests with no idea of what was going wrong I realized I started morphing into an alter ego. I go from strong crisis mom to someone who is standing on a cliff so far out of my comfort zone that all I want to do is drink. (and I’m a recovering alcoholic) I am desperately looking for something to help me cope. That’s when my alter ego takes over that laughs at the most inappropriate moments, I was so bad that the nurses moved my daughter to a private room that up until then had been unavailable. Well at least one good thing came out my bad behavior. Once we got to the private room, we instinctively started looking for something fun to do, something that would take our mind’s off of what was going on around us and make us laugh. On the hospital TV (this was almost 20 years ago, no media on phones) we found this crazy show in Japanese called wipeout, we laughed at that stupid show for a week and it seemed to shift the heaviness of her situation. If you ask her about that week the first things she tells you about is that silly show, not how it felt to be told you had Multiple Sclerosis. That’s my memory too, that’s when I really experienced the POWER of Humor. I have always loved to laugh but never knew the power it had to transform me until then.

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