Communion Of Dreams

[I’ve decided to be public about my realization that I have the onset of MJD, the diagnosis process, and then living with the disease. Given the rarity of this disease, my hope is that this series of blog posts will help educate others, and perhaps provide some insight into it and related conditions. This is the third post in the series, written about a week after the second, as I started reframe what this would mean for me going forward.]

Been an interesting week, as I have been adjusting to the new normal of having MJD (as noted in my previous post, this is now where my head is at, though I won’t have an official diagnosis for about two months yet). It’s mostly been a process of re-calibrating my body awareness: noting that I have these muscle spasms in hands, feet, and legs, that the pain levels are there, and so forth, and then just moving on with my day. Living with chronic pain from a torn intercostal muscle that’s never healed properly, along with the random aches & pains of various abuses I’ve subjected my body to over the years of living life fully, means that to a certain extent the new aches & pains associated with MJD are just more of the same.

That’s not to discount the disease, nor the pain that comes with it. That’s real. And it has an impact. More pain, even if it isn’t worse pain, takes a toll. It wears me down faster. It’s more distracting, so it makes it harder to focus on any given task, especially creative ones. For the most part, though, I can just acknowledge the pain, listen to what it is telling me, account for it, and then get on with whatever I’m trying to do. So the pain isn’t the problem.

What is the problem is the degree to which this interferes with my bookbinding/conservation work. I’d been attributing the aches and pains in my hands to arthritis for years, and in truth I actually do have arthritis in some of the joints in my hands. That’s the result of the trauma inflicted by martial arts (primarily SCA combat) for about a 15 year period when I was a young man.

But worse than the aches and pains is the stiffness, spasming, and occasional loss of control in my hands. So far, the latter has only happened after I have been working using my hands (specifically while putting up the stamped copper ceiling in the kitchen this past winter). But I know it is just a taste of things to come. Dystonia is a classic symptom of MJD, and the spasms and pain in my hands that I’ve noticed the last few years is only likely to get worse and become more of a limitation. I had already started to scale back the conservation work I do, but now I need to be thinking in terms of finishing up pending obligations, handing off clients to other conservators, and becoming officially ‘retired’ as a book conservator. That’ll be a hard adjustment to make, since so much of my self-identity is tied up with it.

* * *

(a few days later… 4/7)

Something I’ve been thinking more about is the difference in the types of pain I’ve been feeling. This is distinctly muscle pain, as opposed to the kind of pain one has from arthritic damage to a joint, or tendon damage, or a broken/bruised bone. This is the kind of thing pretty much everyone has experienced at one time or another, from over-using a muscle (or a group of muscles). It feels almost exactly like what you experience the day after a really hard physical exertion, except it also feels a bit like what you experience shortly after exhausting the muscle in exercise. Think how your calves/feet feel after a five mile hike in street shoes: tired, twitching, and sore. Then add in how your calves would feel the next day, in terms of stiffness and that deep ache. It’s unusual in my experience to have both of those at the same time, but that’s pretty much what my hands and feet/legs feel when I’m having an episode of the MJD effects.

And that’s another thing: this isn’t constant. Not yet, anyway, for me. It’s episodic, lasting for a few hours, at most a day or so. Then it fades for a while. I haven’t yet been able to identify a pattern to the episodes, unlike my intercostal tear (which usually acts up in response to a change in barometric pressure or certain kinds of exertion). It’s possible that there isn’t one, and no way to predict what might trigger an episode. I suspect that may be the case, given that the episodes typically become longer and more frequent over time, until the pain is pretty much constant.

I’m sure I’ll find out. *sigh*

* * *

4/8

Bad episode today. Spasms, twitches, RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome), and a fair amount of muscle pain. Particularly in my hands. Possibly a connection to the cold front (we’ve had spitting snow and wind today, with a hard freeze forecast for tonight)? Whatever, been a rather annoying day. Particularly so since I had been planning on getting some binding work done, and my hands are just in no shape for it, even with having had them in the microwaveable mitts I use to loosen things up.

As I noted above, this is a psychological blow, as much as anything. I’ve never really defined myself in terms of my job, but it has always been one of the interesting things about me. Conservators are so rare that it’s always a talking point when I introduce myself to someone; they always ask about what sorts of things I work on, what’s the oldest/rarest/most valuable item, et cetera. Even surgeons, who seldom suffer from a self-esteem deficit, will pause and with a note of respect ask how I got into such a profession.

I’ll miss that. And I’m honest enough to admit it.

Jim Downey