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Kelly shares relationship and emotional health advice for MS patients.
Kelly:
One of the key elements of living with multiple sclerosis is being open with your communication.
It’s something that I have learned through my 16-year marriage with my husband, is, we communicate about everything. How are you feeling? What do you need?
And I ask him the same questions that he would be asking me. How are you feeling? What do you need?
You know so obviously there are not the same questions that I would be asking him like, are your feet numb? Is the water too hot or is it too warm in here. But the basic questions about communication – how are you feeling – those things.
We were constantly communicating and I think that’s a key component to maintaining a healthy relationship.
One of the other things that’s I think very important personally, living with the disease, is not denying yourself, living with MS, the power of feeling depressed about it and feeling pissed off about it and angry about it and I do.
I have times where it gets difficult. I just want to take the groceries in from the car and that can be an arduous task for me because I can’t carry everything and I can’t take that many trips out to the car to get all the bags in.
And so it’s just very emotional and I allow myself the time to cry about it, to feel really angry about it.
But I always quantify how much time where I think, two minutes, you have two minutes to cry about this and to have your own two-minute pity-party, and I do.
I get very angry about it and again, I do cry about it. But giving myself such a really finite amount of time to have that pity-party and then pull yourself up and get on with it.
That’s what I have done and I continue to do it, like I might have a pity-party trying to get from here out to the car in the parking lot but I do allow myself that.
And I think if you don’t then that could be problematic. You are denying yourself that opportunity.
So I am into feeling things. If you feel sad things obviously you are going to feel happy things. It’s like the counter balance.
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