These friends

I have these friends.

But first, some background. My family has a habit of kind of “adopting” people. Every once in a while we come across someone that we adore so much and who fits so well with us, that we claim them as our own. Call us imperialists, if you want, but I prefer to think we’re big-hearted.

Anyway. These friends. I’ll call them S & W, because those are their initials (I’m subtle that way). I guess we adopted them. They live quite far away, so I don’t get to see them often. But we have plenty of fun, regardless of the distance. For instance, W started an insane NFL football pool that we all play together every fall, and on the message board we write football haiku and post retouched photos of each other in cheerleader attire. Because S & W are (gasp!) Canadian, we’ve had a couple of fun/inebriated  Fourth of July parties when we have subjected them to hilarious and perhaps cruel US citizenship tests. W is my official Blog Tech Support Call Center. They welcomed my little nephew to his home with open arms. I heart them.

But now they’ve gone and done something else. Something that took my breath away.

Maybe it seems like a small thing, but after I was diagnosed with MS, W quietly went and got a bunch of bracelets. You know, the kind that Lance Armstrong made famous:  the LiveStrong ones, the yellow plastic bracelets that everyone wore a few years back. Except these are red and they say, simply, “HOPE MS.”

He didn’t even tell me he did it. My sister, who is  their neighbor, told me. And then she told me that W & S are wearing the bracelets. My sister wears hers. My son wears three or four of them, and proudly tells everyone they’re for his mom.

I wear mine when I can. Because, ironically perhaps, it makes my MS symptoms worse sometimes. Some days just wearing the bracelet is enough to stimulate unbearable nerve pain. But I try to wear it every day. I’m wearing it right now.

I’m new at this whole MS thing, and I’ll admit that sometimes I get lost in the idea of the disease and the fear of what it will do to my body in the unknown future. Sometimes my knees buckle when I’m walking down stairs and it’s enough to make me wonder if I’ll be able to walk when Caleb graduates from high school. Sometimes I forget something on my grocery list and I spend hours terrified that dementia has set in. Probably every day, I wonder when I’ll have an exacerbation and will have to endure another round of steroids. And sometimes it’s time for another shot and its nasty side effects and I just don’t know if I’ll be able to take it every week for the rest of my life.

But when I get overwhelmed, I look at this bracelet I am wearing on my wrist here and now. Here and now, this disease has a much better prognosis than it did 15 years ago. Here and now, I am having a very good today. Here and now, I am not alone, because someone else is wearing the same bracelet and thinking of me. Here and now, I have friends and family who care about me and support me and do things that are so kind I get tears in my eyes. I do not use this word often or lightly, but I would go so far as to say that I am blessed.

So. I have MS. And I have these friends, S & W. Except they’re more like family. And I don’t know if they’ll ever know what an amazing gift they have given me in these bracelets.

And also, I’m gonna kick their butts in the football pool this year. Just sayin.