My Journey Back to Walking On My Own with MS

After being fitted and properly calibrated I was free! Dianne my Bioness rep gave me a few pointers like “only wear it for 20 minutes at first and gradually increase each day so your muscles can get used to the electricity.” While that sounded like good advice I didn’t listen at all!  After being slowed down for the past few years by a toe off, then a KFO and finally the Mamba (My huge cane) it was very liberating to walk using none of it.

Walking out the door electrified and with the ability to use both hands (since I had ditched the Mamba) I took my first steps as a free man. I walked to the trunk of my car and stuffed in all of my now useless equipment. I felt like I was in a gangster flick as I closed the lid. As I drove home my mind raced with possibilities, “I could go to the zoo…or the game…I could walk around the mall…I hate the mall, never mind.” So when I got home I got out of the car and walked two driveways away from my house and turned around and came back, totally wiped out from the trek.

It took me a few more months of physical therapy with Mary but eventually my strength came back and my left leg muscles grew to match my normal sized right leg. To this day I am still blown away by the fact that I am able to normally walk around considering what I thought was going to be the next stop on my journey through MS.

There is a brand new motorized scooter in my garage, its sweet; it has a basket a headlight and a holder for the Mamba. In the basket is the card for the contractor that measured my house for ramps so I could drive up into my house. When I took delivery of the scooter I was a wreck, it was all I could do to not break down and cry after the delivery guy took off. I sat there in my driveway on a sunny, cold November morning and thought to myself “This is really happening, this is it?”

I took it out for a spin and went around the block once and then I put it in the garage where it still sits. It was somewhere soon after that ride that I made the changes in my life that have lead me to this point in my journey, it was then that I took on a warrior mentality. By changing my diet and getting the crazy leg zapper full of alien technology I am now able to walk around the block with my family, happily kicking MS down the block as we go.

Be a Warrior Today,

Donn

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