Choices

It's been so long, I hardly know where to begin.

I organized a regular practica, and then gave it up - not even a full year later. Not only was the practica not breaking even, but I'd have to be in bed the next day to recover from it.

I'm still selling custom Mr. Tango Shoes (Jorge Nel), and selling tango clothes from the US and Argentina. 

I still dance.

Sort of. Sometimes.

Rarely, if I'm honest. Once a week if I'm lucky. Twice a month is getting to be more common. A couple of tandas and I'm done.

I have choices to make. If I go to a milonga across town and I have a flare-up - I'm trapped. I don't drive, so I'm stuck until the dancer who brought me is ready to go home. I can make the best of it but since the cabeceo is a tradition largely ignored here, it means verbal decline after verbal decline - or running away to the loo, or outside, or to get a drink. All I really want to do is sit - not run around avoiding getting asked.

Worse, in a way, is that I really do want to dance. But there is always that one tanda too many, or the un-tested leader who digs fingertips into my ribs, and I'm in pain the rest of the night, the next day . . . 

Choices.

Just skip the milonga? Stay in? Sometimes it's just so much easier.

I miss dancing, but I'm afraid of the pain.  The fear is winning.

I didn't want to live this way. Making decisions based on potential pain instead of potential joy. And now there is even more than just the pain.

Three times this month, I found I could not swallow. Not because of pain, but because I couldn't make my muscles remember how to do it. A stupid thing, really. They only lasted a minute or so. And yet there was a quiet panic.

My fingertips can no longer feel the difference between very hot and very cold things - unless they are hard enough for me to push against. I burned myself trying to be able to feel the heat from a microwaved frozen entree. The panic gets less quiet, and a little more insistent, with that.

Vertigo. Fleeting, but unpredictable. My balance, which I train constantly, suffers occasionally, and like the vertigo, unpredictably. I'm fine, and then I'm not. What if that happens while I'm dancing?

Tremors when I'm over-tired. 

I bring my laundry list of bizarreness to my doctor and my hands are shaking. The thing I blurt out isn't one of the items on the list. It was too big to write down. For the first time in the 5 years he's been treating me, I cried.  

"I can't dance. I'm afraid to dance."

He puts a hand on my shoulder and then looks at my list. 

Tests. More tests. He requests an MRI and the insurance company refuses it until every other test has been done.

Low B12? No.

Lyme disease? No.

Lupus (Is this a House episode?) No.

Myasthenia Gravis? No.

Neurosyphilis? No. 

Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis? (I hope that's not on the quiz.) No.

So many tests that I stopped asking the nurse what they were testing for this time.

Multiple Sclerosis?

MS? That MS? 

My doctor sighed deeply. 'When everything else has been eliminated, well . . .  there is still the MRI.  And a few more tests."  

And in the strangest words of comfort I've ever received from a doctor, "there's still a chance you have some interesting, exotic infection."  He half-smiled. It worked, I smiled back. 

As I was leaving, he asked, "When is your next big dance to-do?"

"End of October - I'm going to Albuquerque."

"We'll get you dancing by Albuquerque."

Please. Yes, please.