Thoughts On Upcoming Neurology Appointment

I’ve got a neurologist appointment tomorrow. It has been a few years since I’ve had one. It’s not the appointment itself that makes me nervous but I’m feeling nervous. I’m dragging my feet on packing and getting myself ready to leave the apartment. See, the appointment is up in Seattle but I’m living down near Portland now so instead of driving three hours to the appointment tomorrow morning I’m going to spend the night with my friend who took over my old apartment in Kirkland.

I know the appointment is going to be fine. I will spend a lot of time waiting, get my vitals taken, and answer a lot of questions. They are going to tell me that I need to get an MRI and it’s the MRI results that have me feeling nervous. The MRI results are going to let the neurologist know if my meds are working and I don’t know what I’m going to do if they’re not. If the meds are not working, then the treatment plan is going to have to change. Right now I only have to take a pill twice a day. Some of the other treatments are more intense. I’ve heard the infusions are exhausting but you only have to get them a few times a year.

I know it doesn’t do much good to worry about something that might not even happen, the medication I’m taking right now could be keeping the MS at bay just fine. But I have noticed some symptoms flaring up over the past few months so there’s some seeds of doubt in my mind. I think I’m going to be a bit mad at myself if I find out I had another flare up in the past couple of years because that would mean that at some point I didn’t listen to my body and just “pushed through” whatever was going on. To me that’s a scarier thought than the medication not working. If the medication isn’t working that’s the medication, and admittedly there could be a user error contribution to that because there was like a month where I missed one of my doses once a week. If I missed a flare up, I wasn’t giving my body the care and attention it needed and that’s all me.