postponing the inevitable...

here's what's on my mind right now, in more ways than one...

i'm way overdue for an MRI. i haven't had one since august of 2004, before i moved to pittsburgh and started law school. for the first year i was here i had a total egomaniacal jackass for a neurologist, who seemed to think that he was way smarter than all of my docs in philadelphia and that there was no reason for me to be taking the MS meds and having regular scans of my brain.

so i decided to take my treatment into my own hands. i gradually weaned myself off my anti-seizure meds, and eventually stopped taking the MS injections i was supposed to have once a week. in that way that i can justify anything, i slowly began to believe that there was nothing wrong with me (the aforementioned egomaniac was a jerk, but i had no concrete reason to believe that he was incorrect in his un-diagnosis, right?), and the injections made me feel like crap-ola for the better part of one day per week, and given all the stuff that school required i do with my time, sacrificing 1/7th of each week to what may or may not be doing anything for me seemed kinda silly.

but lately i've been getting weird tremors in my ankles. it's probably nothing. they only last a couple of seconds, and they don't impair my ability to move or walk or anything at all, but i'd be a lying kind of a guy if i didn't say that the tiny spasms scare the hell out of me, and fill me with all the weird hypochondria that was a part of my daily life almost two years ago...

now i have a new neurologist, who is truly fantastic and with whom i feel very comfortable, and he wants me to have an MRI and an EEG done...this month.

which brings us to this moment. it's january 18th. have i scheduled those scans yet? nope. do i have a good reason for not having done so? nope. want to know the real reason why i haven't? because i'm chicken. i'm a scared little girl of what they're going to show. and despite the claims that knowledge is power, sometimes ignorance is bliss...

but the real truth is that despite my fears, i'm determined not to let something that i can't control get the better of me. and pretending that things are okay is, in some sense, deceiving myself into allowing the unknown to have some control over my life. and i'm smarter than that.

so, in that 3 hour block of free time i have tomorrow between jurisprudence and estates & trusts, i'm going to make some appointments to get my brain tested.

and regardless of what those tests show, i'm okay. i'll be okay. i'm better than my fears.