A country girl at heart

I am a country fan, I’ll admit. And that is strange given that I grew up in Philadelphia where WMMR (Rock) was everyone’s favorite station. But I am a country fan now. And as long as I can listen to the music (and not the kids CD), I do. A few years back, Tim McGraw came out with a song called “Live like you were dying”. And in listening to the lyrics, I thought of my MS, not that MS is going to make me die in a few months but what a concept.

In the song, a man talks about what he did when he was faced with some bad medical news. And the whole point of the song was that the medical news did not stop him from living his life. If anything it made him go out a try things that he may never have tried. It made him a better friend, son and husband. This is the part that reminds me of my MS.

Ok, I have not and will never go sky-diving like the man in the song nor bull riding but I did go
mountain climbing. I have done a lot of things that in part were done because of the MS. I definitely have the thought of “will I be able to do this later or not” go across my mind. And it is a decision factor in what I choose to do today versus tomorrow. Now, I am not saying that I live in today and never plan in the future. I plan in the future all the time and most times MS isn’t even a consideration. We are going to Disney next year and I am not expecting there to be any problems with the MS. But there are definitely some things that I did sooner rather than waiting.

A few years before the song was released, I was asked to speak at a charity event for MS. And of the 200 or so attendees, about 25 actually stopped what they were doing to listen. The rest, the invincible I call them, stood in the back at the bar and kept up their own conversations. I wanted to yell out to them to listen because they too may be faced with a diagnosis, even if it was not MS. I remember being invincible at 22, 23, 24 yrs old, as most of them were around those ages. I was a picture of health (maybe not as toned as I should’ve been). But that ended June 25, 2007 when the doctor said you have MS. Then I didn’t feel invincible at all.

After the speech, I was talking to a few people that had listened and they commented on the lack of attention by so many people. And one of the people in the group said that the people who listened did so because they care – they have MS or someone they know has MS or another chronic disease. And the people that didn’t listen will listen when it becomes real to them. The song reminds me of the invincibles because at the end of the chorus, McGraw says “I hope someday you get the chance to live like you were dying.” It’s kind of what I wanted to say not that I would wish MS or any other disease on a person, but to live life to the fullest is something I struggle to do everyday.