So what’s it like being a guy with MS? You know, MS is reputed to be a “woman’s disease”, I’ve read that countless times but digging a little deeper I’ve found that the figures don’t quite bear out my preconceptions. It seems that 60% of people with MS are female and the other 40% are male. Or maybe it’s 70/30. Or maybe it’s 66/33 (twice as many women as men). It depends on who you read.

So what’s with this “woman’s disease” thing? Why do I hear and read so much more about women with MS than I do men? It’s not like there’s twice as much written about women with MS as there is about men. It’s much worse than that.
After all MS doesn’t make me exactly a babe magnet even if it could be good for the occasional pity hug from a friend. As if that matters.

I guess Real Men don’t go to group therapy meetings. That reminds me of the Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche book back in the 80s. I was once actually eating quiche in a restaurant back then when some macho guy walking by told me “Real men don’t eat quiche”. Now remember, I was a skinny geek at that time.
Errr… i still am.
I looked up at him without changing expression and said “Real men eat what they damn well please. You got a problem with that?” He just laughed nervously and walked on, you see, I may be a geek but I had “the look”.

Although women have been liberated from their role models and now felt free to take on whatever components of “men’s work” they felt empowered to tackle, they practiced selective blindness where some tasks are concerned. In short, there now is no such thing as “man’s work” and “women’s work”: there’s “people’s work” and…. wait for it… “man’s work”. The “man’s work” has been redefined by the revisionist feminist hierarchy to be the things that men formerly did but now women don’t feel like doing. Particularly, if it is:

* dirty,
* smelly,
* cold,
* uncomfortable,
* disgusting, or
* strenuous,

then it is “men’s work”.

So what’s a guy with MS to do? When we’re not being sensitive and emotionally available we’re expected at the whim of a woman to be strong and silent macho John Wayne clones through rain and snow.
I’m still the one who now hates the heat because it exacerbates all MS symptoms and hates the cold because it makes the spasticity even harder to bear.
“I’m sorry honey, but I’ve only got a small energy budget for each day and if I use it now I’ll be in bed for the rest of the day” just doesn’t cut it in the real world.

I’m at the stage where I can still do things, but at a much reduced level and a higher cost.
Which part of my body am I willing to surrender to numbness in order to do that chore?
Is that morning task important enough to justify being too tired in the afternoon when some unforeseen but more important task might turn up?
I’m between the proverbial rock and a hard place, up the proverbial creek without a paddle. I guess, as John Wayne said “Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway”.