buggery | and, on an entirely personal note

This has nothing to do with fandom, so if that's all you're here for, skip this post.

Five years ago, my life changed. I woke up the morning of 8 January 2000 (also a Saturday, in some strange coincidence) to find that my body had stopped working properly overnight. Literally overnight -- I had been at a friend's birthday party the night before and, despite being only *almost* completely over a cold I'd had earlier in the week, I'd felt fine.

Not that Saturday morning. I woke up exhausted like I'd never felt exhausted before. Just getting out of bed made me out of breath. When I was able to get to the doctor Tuesday, he diagnosed me with bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics. I was supposed to be better in a couple of weeks.

The bronchitis went away on schedule, but the shortness of breath and the debilitating exhaustion persisted. I tried to go back to work -- I had to, because according to the doctor I was recovered -- where I discovered that my muscles were failing when I nearly collapsed getting up from my desk.

I--

::pauses::

Fuck.

I've been thinking about making this post for a couple of weeks, ever since I realised that this was the five-year anniversary coming up. Five years. Five years since the last time I would ever run up a flight of stairs -- ever run *anywhere* -- fuck.

::pauses again::

I don't think I can do the kind of looking-back I'd planned to. I know I'm not up to detailing the months of abuse from the medical community before someone finally looked at me and said "Oh, you have multiple sclerosis," or the months of abuse from my Evil Ex who couldn't deal with me not getting better and drove me to make two suicide attempts, or the pain of having people I'd thought were my friends abandon me when I could no longer keep up, or the pain of losing my house, or terror I felt when the nursing home I wound up in tried to have me drugged into a stupor because I'd asked for my grilled cheese to be served warm and my cold cereal not to be liquefied to mush.

It hasn't all been bad.

I'm no longer a workoholic -- I'm physically incapable of it now -- and that has to be good for me. I have new friends, many of whom are disabled themselves. My government disability benefits came through just in time to enable my escape from the scary nursing home and get me my current apartment, which all things considered is a pretty nice place to live. My cat is back with me.

I have more free time for fandom. I have two very fulfilling volunteer jobs that don't require so much of my time that I exhaust myself and that I can take a day off from when I need to. I have a motorised wheelchair now that enables me to have three times as much of a life as before, because I can go places and do things for myself that just wouldn't be possible without it. I got into a brilliant program that lets disabled people hire their own aides, whose main fault is that it takes so long to get into (over eight months from approval to active status, after over a year on the waiting list).

I don't have any pat conclusion for this post. There are things about my life now that are arguably better than before. Were they worth everything I had to lose?

I'm still grieving. I may never be entirely over it.

edited to add:
Wow. Thank you *all* for your outpouring of support. I... can't actually respond to the individual comments right now, so in the meantime, blanket gratitude.