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it has to be bad news/bad news so you'd rather not say."

I limped to my car, my knee and groin still smarting, and calmly unlocked it, inserted the key, put the top down (I drive a French vanilla ice cream color new VW convertible because it makes me happy and seems to have the same affect on other drivers, a big smile crossing its hood and smiley headlights), backed out of the garage and called my mother. Then I burst into tears.

Now please understand, I am simply not a person who feels sorry for herself. An old friend once gave me her cane (she overcame MS after having it for 20 years) and I accepted it as a good luck token and because it had a round ball top that half unscrewed to reveal a compass and all the way unscrewed to reveal a tiny flask. I thought it might come in handy on a few counts if ever it came to that. It never has, including the knee surgery. I spent most of my life as a runner. Hence the rotten knees requiring arthroscopic tune-up. Now I am a walker. I walk through things. I walk past things. I walk onto and off of airplanes, even after I fell while visiting a sister in Spokane and actually fractured my left kneecap on Good Friday. Yes, the same one I'd just had fixed, darn it all. But even on crutches, I decline wheelchairs. I am, I submit once more, a walker. The other reason I accepted the cane, never believing I'd actually NEED it, was because I wanted Patty's good fortune to rub off on me. I wanted the MS to leave me miraculously.

A few nights after the grim doctor appointment my daughter (age ten) and I were up late on a Friday night watching Dr. House on cable. He had a teenage patient whom they suspected had rapidly progressive MS. Dr. House lamented in his acerbic way that it was "not the fun kind of MS with the 10k's and the bike rides and the balloons for the gimps in wheelchairs, but the serious, zero to sixty in a few months, then in a chair, then on a respirator, then in the ground." I may be paraphrasing slightly, but I doubt House would mind.

I actually used that line about being grateful for the "fun kind" of MS these past seven years, as they have been a blessing in disguise in many ways to me who always ran through life. I was a single mom from about four minutes after Olivia's conception. I taught high school English full-time. I also helped start a program for teachers to earn their Masters degrees in partnership with Arizona State University and the school systems in the Phoenix area. I taught three classes in that

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