Bitch, please!!!!

I have multiple sclerosis (MS), and the one thing that bothers me the most, besides having this disease, is that some people expect me to be upbeat all of the time. I call this the myth of the happy cripple.

The happy cripples are characters such as Tiny Tim, who is always hobbling around on his crutches with a smile on his face in The Christmas Carol. Everybody instantly loves him because he is this kid who is all upbeat even though he is actively dying. Then there is the character of Klara from the film Heidi. She’s only crippled because her outlook isn’t positive enough. If she’s a happy cripple she’ll learn to walk and never need that darned wheelchair ever again!

If you have a progressive disease that has no known cause or cure, such as the one I have, it is very hard sometimes to be happy. In fact most days I’m pretty pissed off to some degree about the whole thing. No amount of rabid smiling or jigging around with my cane like a maniac is going to change that fact. You can’t ‘fight’ a disease like this one. The most I can do is eat semi-healthily, do my exercises, take my meds and not try to overextend myself.

Another aspect to all of this that gets on my last nerve is that within the MS community there are certain people who really push at others to accept the fact that they have the disease and to come to terms with it quietly. Coming to terms with a life altering disease was actually easy for me because I was already morbid and nihilistic as hell. However, I refuse to act all meek so that others feel comfortable around me. If somebody asks me how I’m feeling I’m not going to smile and say ‘I feel jiffy today!’, because I just about never feel normal or 100% okay. Every single day I feel like crap to a varying degree, so if people ask me how I feel I’m going to be truthful about it.

My favourite thing to do is to embarrass people when they tell me that I am too young to use a cane. Seriously, I have had a handful of people actually telling me that as I am walking down the high street in town. Every single time an idiot tells me that I snap back ‘ I turn 50 next year and have multiple sclerosis.’ The colour then drains out of their face and they scamper away. See, when you are crippled you are supposed to be artificially happy and they don’t expect this cripple to talk back.

Remember, if you witness somebody who is visibly crippled being in a bad mood don’t automatically think that they should be happy. People who are having medical issues shouldn’t have to fake being happy just to make you feel better about the situation.