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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.
The Many Faces of MS: Four Shades of the Same Beast
Doctors love tidy categories. It makes their conferences neater and their PowerPoints prettier. They say there are four main types of MS: CIS, RRMS, SPMS, PPMS. Add a few rarities for spice malignant, benign, radiological-only and voilà: a zoo of acronyms.
But here’s the truth: those tidy boxes don’t mean a damn thing when you’re living it. MS doesn’t give a toss about your labels. It just chews through nerves at its own pace while you try to hang on with your fingernails.
My Version of the Four Types
The Intruder Phase
The first knock at the door. A rogue signal. Something’s off, but you don’t yet know the squatters have moved in. Fear mixed with disbelief, like waiting for a verdict you already know is guilty.
The Checkerboard War
Flare, heal, flare, heal. A sick game of snakes and ladders, only the dice are loaded. You learn strategy: rest, attack, regroup. But the house always wins in the end.
The Slow Burn
Relapses fade, but the damage doesn’t. Inch by inch, it eats. You don’t need a flashy MRI to prove it you can feel the slow rot in your bones, your mind, your will. This is SPMS: the bastard’s long game.
The Quiet Conquest
For some, there’s no drama, no storms, no sudden drops. Just a slow, relentless tightening of the vice. That’s PPMS: the quiet predator. It doesn’t roar, it whispers while it strangles.
And then there are the ghost forms: so-called benign (which feels like a cruel joke) or the malignant that slams into you like a train.
What These Labels Hide
- Flux & Overlap: The lines aren’t walls. You slide, bleed, convert. Boxes aren’t boundaries, just suggestions.
- Emotional Punch: Being told “you have PPMS” is like being handed a death sentence dressed up in medical Latin.
- The System’s Lens: These labels exist for trials, drugs, and insurance companies. They don’t guide your daily grind.
- Your Identity: To outsiders, you become the acronym. But you are not “SPMS.” You are a person dragging a monster.
My Hope, My Roar
These categories might help doctors, but they don’t define us. If MS insists on giving me a label, I’ll twist it into something else. I’ll call it by my words: intruder, war, burn, conquest.
Because at the end of the day, there isn’t four MSes. There’s one beast, swapping masks. Today it’s relapse and remission, tomorrow it’s slow suffocation. Same predator, different costume.
So when the next shiny study lands new drug, new vitamin, new miracle—I check the fine print. Who are they studying? “Active MS”? “Early RRMS”? The rest of us watch from the side-lines, left holding the bill.
I roar because I’ve been there. I’ve seen the trenches. I’ve lived beyond the tidy labels. And if MS dares to name me, I’ll name it back with rage, with metaphor, with gallows humour.
Afternoon AI Thought: MS has “four types,” they say. I say it’s one predator with a wardrobe problem today a wolf, tomorrow a vulture, always the same teeth.
I write in ink and fury, in breath and broken bone.
Through storm and silence, I survive. That is the crime and the miracle.
