Flying Bras and...

A Saxon Sam

Description

This is all the wrong way round. Normally people get famous for doing something and then make lots of money from their autobiography. You've never heard of Sam but she went and wrote her autobiography anyway, mostly to make people laugh. You'll quickly learn that she has two life changing disabilities. Bone idle slobbishness definitely came first but there is this MS thing that is annoyingly difficult to ignore. This book is her story in her voice about how she deals with both problems (frequently ignoring the first) and uses her humour, her stubbornness and her brain to make sure no-one will say she got left behind. 25% of the royalties from the book will be donated to MS-UK (www.ms-uk.org)

Sujets

• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 02 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784629465
• Langue: English

Extrait

Flying Bras and…
Sam A. Saxon

Copyright © 2015 Sam A. Saxon
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1784629 465
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador ® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

Converted to eBook by EasyEPUB
Contents

Cover


Flying Bras and…


.... fantastic news!


Prologue: MS diagnosis


…tectonic shifts


Chapter 1: My family


…dogs, bees and brothers


Chapter 2: My childhood


…hormones


Chapter 3: Big school


…fake carnations


Chapter 4: University


…friends


Chapter 5: Postgrad years


…you just know


Chapter 6: More postgrad years


…professionalism?


Chapter 7: The real world


…Baileys (other cream-based alcoholic drinks are available)


Chapter 8: The surreal world


…root beer


Chapter 9: Great holidays


…fish bowls


Chapter 10: MS Progression


Chapter 11: This thing inside me


…MINE!


Chapter 12: Being a part of life
Flying Bras and…
Dedicated to all those fantastic people who get metaphorically kicked to the ground but get up and get on with life anyway.
And to those wonderful people who stop and lend them a hand.
X

The author gives great thanks to her friends, family and other loved ones for their encouragement, support and superior knowledge of the English language.
XX

Cover artwork © 2014 BTP

Proof reading by Rock Chick

25% of the royalties from the book will be donated to MS-UK ( www.ms-uk.org )
.... fantastic news!
Prologue: MS diagnosis
We were all stood in the dining room at our old house. Mum was in tears, Dad was looking very serious and worried, and my younger brother, who was about 11 at the time, looked to me like an 11-year old who’d rather be outside playing. This arsehole of a consultant neurologist, who clearly had no idea how to talk to a 15-year-old girl, had left me to get dressed and spoke to Mum out of my earshot. She then had to drive both of us home and wait until the whole family was together before telling me why I had a numb leg…Multiple Sclerosis.
Mum and Dad could see the darkest images of the future and were only too aware of some of the likely problems ahead. Me, I was a selfish, short sighted 15-year old; I cared mostly about boys, looking good and being liked. My first thought – now I have an excuse to get out of doing sports – fan-bloody-tastic!
*
Some months before the diagnosis, I got a weird white patch in the middle of my vision in my left eye. It was like the fuzzy edging on a romantic love scene but in the middle of the picture. Dad and I went to see my GP, a very sweet, elderly guy who years before gave me Dolly Mixture sweets from a coloured jar as a reward for being a good girl.
The doctor asked me to read the eye chart on his white door. I could do this with my right eye, no problem; but when I looked with my left eye I couldn’t see the chart at all. Literally, the black letters on the white chart, which was hung on his white door all looked white. Dad was so freaked out he had to leave the room. I can’t say I was too chuffed either, but freaked is the wrong word because I’d been looking through that eye for a bit and kind of knew what to expect.
The doctor sent me for a few tests including an one, where they injected fluorescent gunk into my blood stream and looked at the blood vessels on my retina. This didn’t show anything unusual at all but that evening it did make my pee a bright fluorescent yellow, which was entertaining in a perverse way. I don’t remember being overly stressed out about my sight; maybe I was, but I just remember a feeling of intellectual curiosity.
Coincidentally, when my eyes were tested the optician noticed a bit of short sightedness, so I got glasses. Of course they were dead-stylish 1980s plastic NHS glasses, which I hated and wore as little as possible (note earlier comment about looking good). At the same time, the white patch in my vision disappeared which threw me off the scent – I just thought, maybe it was related to the short sightedness. Of course this made no sense at all , but I didn’t question it any further.
That summer we went to see my grandparents in Canada. For no apparent reason I fainted in Grandma’s car. I also threw up, which must have pleased her no end. I saw a local doctor but we didn’t find a reason. This may have been a coincidence – teenagers do that sort of thing – but it did seem like something was not quite right.
The next thing was being back at home. I woke up one weekend morning and realised that my right leg, below my knee was feeling partially numb. I assumed I’d just been lying on it and had cut my circulation off, so I turned over and went back to sleep. I’d say I was just being a lazy teenager, but I’m now in my 40s and nothing’s changed. When I eventually woke up again my leg still felt numb. Over the next few days the numbness spread up my leg until it stopped at my waist. The weird thing was that the edge of the numbness was very sharp – it went very neatly from my toes up my leg, to my belly button, around my waist and down the middle of my back to my bum. On the other side of the line it felt completely normal. Another GP visited us and very gently poked my skin with a pin which I couldn’t feel at all on the numb side. I spent the next few days with a kind of morbid curiosity, poking myself with a pin to see just how sharp the line was, which was strange in itself because I’ve always had a thing about needles. I learnt much later that the GP had quietly said to Dad that he suspected I might have MS.
Incidentally, I had just split up from my first boyfriend, but more on him later.
The GP referred me to the aforementioned arsehole consultant who arranged a bunch of tests. MRI didn’t exist at the time. That would point to MS quite quickly, but then it was a process of elimination to check the symptoms weren’t caused by something else. I had an Electro-Cardio-Gram where they attached a lot of electrodes to my scalp. This must have looked great because I had a lot of hair at the time and finding my scalp wasn’t trivial. They then measured the electrical activity in my brain, proving beyond a shadow of doubt that I definitely had one!. It also helped prove that nothing else was wrong with me and I almost certainly had MS. I was offered a spinal lumbar puncture, but it sounded very painful and was unlikely to tell us anything we hadn’t already worked out.
I remember phoning a friend to tell her that I had a diagnosis. I asked her what the letters ‘MS’ meant to her and she questioningly replied: “Menstrual stress?” If only! She should have known better, because a local woman with MS had visited our school and told us her story, so we had at least heard of it.
For anyone who doesn’t know, MS is a condition whereby sufferers have an over enthusiastic immune system which, instead of doing useful things like preventing colds, attacks the ends of the nerves, which leads to scarring. So messages about sensations or movement get confused, slowed down or even stopped, leading to symptoms like strange feelings, numbness, stiffness and general crapness of movement (technical term). In the earlier stages I would have a particular symptom for a month or two. Then, because I had got use to it to some extent, I would suddenly realise it had actually been gone for a while and things would get roughly back to normal until the next symptom came along. In fact, the symptom may have only 95% gone and there was probably some residual effect. This is technically known as the ‘relapse and remitting’ stage and is what most people know as the MS pattern.
After 10 years or so, the overall pattern changed to what the doctors call ‘secondary progressive MS’ whereby there is no gap between the relapses. It just got progressively worse or, as I call it, the ‘shit and getting shittier’ phase. Some people skip the first stage entirely and go straight to what’s called the ‘primary progressive’ stage. My first symptom was unusually early, lucky me! Normally, people get diagnosed somewhere between their mid 20s and 40s. But, other than that, everyone is different. There is no set pattern that can be predicted and, whilst there might be similarities, the exact symptoms I got may not be like anyone else’s. At the time of writing this book, there are some treatments to help alleviate symptoms but no known cure.
*
One day, out of nearly nowhere, I decided to write a book about my life so far. This is only one person’s story; by no means are other people with MS, or any kind of disability, going to be where I am now. Already I feel like I’ve made this sound like a nauseatingly worthy book about someone setting themselves up as some kind of battling hero. Obviously the MS is a major part of my life, but there is a lot more to me and hopefully that’s already obvious. There’s a much bigger part of me which has always loved making people laugh, so more than anything that is what I want this book to do.
By the way, people who know me will have spotted that the cup size on the cover might be a wee diddy little bit of an exaggera