The surgery itself gets all the planning. There is a date on the calendar, a surgeon, a pre op checklist, a ride home. Then the operation is over, and the recovery just sort of happens to you.

When a baby arrives, almost every question goes to the mother, and rightly so. Her recovery is physical and immediate and visible. But there is a second person in the room who is also being quietly remade by this, and almost nobody checks on him.

You had COVID. Maybe it was bad, maybe it was not. Maybe you were barely symptomatic during the actual infection. Either way, you expected to recover. A few weeks, maybe a month. Then life resumes. That is how it is supposed to go.

There is something deeply unfair about multiple sclerosis. Not just in the medical sense, but in the social one.