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⚠️ Please read with care: This blog shares personal, sometimes painful experiences. My intention is to support and speak honestly not to harm. I’m not a professional, just someone who understands how hard it can get. If you're struggling, you're not alone please reach out for professional help.
Pets and Mental Health
Let’s be honest: when you’ve got MS, or any chronic delight that chews through your brain and body like a rat in a cereal box, you need a bit of backup. Enter pets. They’re either the reason you cling to sanity… or the reason you’re face-planting on the carpet because your bulldog “accidentally” herded you into the coffee table.
Companionship and Emotional Support
Unconditional Love: Which really means they love you because you smell like food and have opposable thumbs. Still, it beats human relationships half the time.
Routine and Responsibility: Feeding them, walking them, remembering to let them out before they piss on the carpet — structure, baby. Sometimes that’s the only structure MS lets you have.
Stress Reduction
Physical Touch: Stroking a cat reduces stress. Stroking a dog reduces stress. Stroking a hedgehog raises questions.
Distraction from Worries: Watching your cat fail to jump on the sofa is cheaper than therapy and about as effective.
Recognizing Emotional Changes
Behavioral Cues: Dogs sense when you’re sad. Cats sense it too, but only so they can sit directly on your bladder until you cry harder.
Encouraging Activity: Dogs make you move. Cats make you a static heating pad. Either way, your muscles get a workout — voluntary or not.
Mood Enhancement
Joy and Laughter: A dog chasing its tail. A cat chasing nothing. Both are funny until you remember they probably think the same thing watching you.
Social Interaction: Walking a dog = conversations with strangers. Owning a cat = conversations with yourself. Both keep you just sane enough not to hit anyone.
Pets will either:
Save your mental health.
Destroy your house.
Remind you that death comes for all of us (but first for the goldfish).
Still, between the fur, farts, and emotional chaos, they’re usually worth it. Unless you’re allergic. Then it’s just asthma and regret.
I write in ink and fury, in breath and broken bone.
Through storm and silence, I survive. That is the crime and the miracle.
