It’s hot here. 37 degrees plus humidity. Sun finally beating down and I should be appropriately grateful after months and months of rain, but I’m not.
Because I have MS, and the heat means I turn into a close approximation of a three toed sloth.
I move slowly, deliberately, as if wading through jello or like I’m being created in slow motion.
My brain slows, too. I lose words and thoughts and struggle with spatial situations, get disorganized, sleep a lot.
It’s a bizarre thing to watch happen in myself, as I usually move swiftly and think fast and multitask. But I can feel it all sliding over me, caul-like, filtering the world out.
MS docs explain it in that the heat causes my itching swelling brain to become more inflamed, that as the inflammation occurs, the nerve connections start misfiring and there’s so much neural noise that conduction is slowed or misdirected. So my arm muscles twitch (ha! Effortless exercise!) and my legs kick and yet when I want them to move, there’s nothing but a quiet snickering along the lines.
It’s all good. I’ll be back to normal once it cools down a bit. But for now I exist like a car on a construction laden road – moving slowly forward, subject to frequent stops.