Churning Butter and Other Musings

One time I was filling out a form online and I mistakenly clicked “start over” instead of “continue”. Of course, everything I had just typed in was gone and I was annoyed. Grumbling under my breath about the placement of the buttons while I was redoing the form, I stopped typing. At that moment, I had a shift in my way of thinking. Yes, it’s true that I HATE redoing things for no good reason, it’s also true that it’s only some keystrokes to complete it. It’s not as though I was redoing an entire cuneiform tablet or a mural with hieroglyphics.

Things like that make me question whether I would have survived in ancient times or even fairly recent past times. On those rare occasions when the power goes out, I sort of lose my mind. It’s usually too dark to read, and everything else I think of doing requires electricity.

Inevitably, my mind wanders to other things such as, how did people with MS manage without modern conveniences? We’ve known about MS for just over 150 years, but I would hazard a guess that it’s been around for much longer. How did the pioneer woman with MS churn butter? How did the knight don armor in the summer?

Of course, like free word association, other questions arise. Here it is 2022 and people don’t fully grasp what MS does to a person. How on earth could someone in 1653 explain that they couldn’t lift the pail of water from the well because they were just too weak? How could someone in 1778 explain that he couldn’t wear the wool uniform in the summer because it was way too hot? How could an infantryman explain to his CO in the civil war that he couldn’t march 200 miles in 17 days?

If I had no air conditioning, I would likely be incarcerated for manslaughter, or at the very least assault. When I am overheated, I am this/close to turning into a rabid animal. How did people with MS function before Mr. Carrier invented air conditioning?

How could Miss Eliza convince anyone she couldn’t walk? I imagine she looked fine, except that she couldn’t walk. How did Henry the VIII’s chef explain he forgot about the venison cooking and it burned? I cringe at that scenario. It’s not like there was Door Dash back then.

People with MS are (sometimes) miserable in modern times. I can’t imagine living in the past with MS. I know in those 10 years (in the 20^th and 21^st centuries!) I spent searching for an explanation/diagnosis, I really began to doubt myself. After years of hearing that I was “fine”, I was somewhat unsure if there was anything wrong. I wonder how people in the 14^th or 19^th century dealt with having MS, especially not knowing it was MS? In my case, not knowing what was wrong with me was maddening. I can only imagine that people thought themselves cursed; that there was witchcraft or voodoo at work. One could argue that they were indeed cursed- haven’t we all felt cursed at one time or another?