On Stereotypes of People with Multiple Sclerosis

By Alberto J. Quiroga Puertas

Posted February 4, 2021

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master;/so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” –Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”

I often find myself musing about these lines. Since being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2008, what have I lost? Am I entitled to think about it as a “disaster”? “Lose something every day”, Bishop says.

The first symptoms experienced by a person with MS are related to their motor functions, and my body has always been too eager to obey: the lack of sensitivity in the hand that makes you drop things, the loss of strength in a leg that forces you to walk as if you were embodying an iamb. Like the dress code required for some special occasions, it seems that crutches, wheelchairs, sticks, and mobility scooters are a sine qua non for the self-presentation of MS patients. It is unsurprising then that the stereotypical perception of people affected by MS starts and too often stops at their physical appearance.

But there is more to MS than problems with walking and grabbing. Bishop goes on: “Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster”. These lines that ponder the lost memory of emotional landmarks are what resonate so strongly for me. Because of MS I have lost places, names and memories; in their place I have attention deficit, difficulties with speech…and more.

These symptoms are not as visible as the motor problems, yet they affect up to two thirds of patients with Multiple Sclerosis. In my case, at some point in the course of the illness the sense of belonging to the race of the lotus-eaters have taken hold of me due to cognitive and memory losses. Forgetfulness and apathy usually lull me into a state in which the ability to concentrate and to work is displaced by absent-mindedness and inattention. This has been especially hard to deal with as a teacher, forcing me to become as polytropos as Odysseus by resorting to a series of Classics-related topics when memory fails me while lecturing or when I lose the train of thought in the middle of an explanation. In these moments, I deflect the students’ attention to topics I have prepared beforehand: Have you read this book on artificial intelligence in antiquity? Or noticed the similarities between recent political event and Thucydides’ approach to politics? Did you get all the nods to ancient Greece and Rome in Wonder Woman 1984?

Conferences and seminars, however, are a very different challenge for me. “I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,/some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent./I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster”: I have missed opportunities to (re)visit cities and places in which conferences were held when I decided not to attend them. Giving papers and answering questions are particularly tricky for me: I would never claim to have been a good speaker, but now I have more difficulty pronouncing words and phrases correctly—either in Spanish or English—as speech impairments advance. When it comes to answering questions from the audience, so far people have been kind enough to accept non-sensical stuttering I give them as a response—coming up with extemporaneous, unprepared answers ticks all the boxes of my weaknesses: you need to be precise, quick, and accurate in providing information in a non-native language. After that, I find myself in a Catch-22 situation. On the one hand, an intense sense of having disappointed people comes over me and I worry that I should have warned organizers in advance. But if I let them know in advance, would they think that I am shying away from entering an academic discussion, or that I am making excuses for not being able to meet their standards?

“It’s evident/the art of losing’s not too hard to master/though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster”: having MS may look like disaster because of all the things that you lose along the way. Independence, mobility, memory, and thought processes cannot be not taken for granted any longer, but their recession becomes the center of your daily life and academic work. When small tasks are achieved (e.g., completing a lecture free of diversions, coming up with the precise word after a few attempts), I come to fully understand that working to mitigate the sense of disaster has its own pleasures.

Alberto J. Quiroga Puertas is a Lecturer in the Ancient Greek Department at the University of Granada, and can be found at @ajquiroga1 on Twitter. He thanks Clara Bosak-Schroeder, Ryan Fowler and Angie Jiménez for their help and encouragement to write this piece.