My MS Bully and Me

Copyright: C King In the late 1980s, a well known pop duo sang "She's got the look". This song came to mind as I stood at the bus stop waiting for my bus which is notoriously devious in not announcing itself via the destination board. Why was this song in my head? Because today, silly me, I don't look sick.  Apparently, if you wear a stonking, great badge saying 'Please offer me a seat', this actually means you must be absolutely fine, as well as having a predilection for the colour blue or large badges, or playing an April Fool's joke on anyone you meet. This badge seemingly provides an excuse to raise the newspaper over your face or stare intently out of a dirty window at traffic. If you're not doing any of the above, you're suddenly finding the floor extremely interesting. In fact, I'm pretty sure that someone once even had a pretend conversation on their phone to avoid the overwhelming awkwardness. Are we having a rant today? Y...

  Copyright: C King How can having an invisible symptom be useful, I hear you ask. I'm going to start this off by being very clear that I'm not suggesting that being invisible in itself is useful or that those of us with chronic illness are deliberately hiding our symptoms. Nor am I encouraging people not to share their condition with anyone.  On this World MS Day, social media will undoubtedly be flooded by posts about invisible symptoms. Rightly so, as it's important for non-MSers to understand these symptoms, and perhaps for others in chronic illness communities to see the relative similarities and differences in our conditions.  I'd like to do something different, however. I would like to look at when having symptoms that are invisible, may be advantageous. When we're not ready Sometimes, we just aren't ready to show our hand. This is true of lots of situations. As a member of various online forums, I see people who have just started dating someone...