Multiple Sclerosis - Emotions Loss with Guest and PhD Academic Hannah Morris The MS Show

Part of the series - Emotions with Multiple Sclerosis.
This episode explores “Loss and Multiple Sclerosis”. Bron is joined by Hannah Morris, PhD Student at Reading University.
Hannah’s studies are exploring “Psychological Support in Multiple Sclerosis”. More details about this and a link to her research questions are below. Please do take part if you are part of the MS Community:
https://research.reading.ac.uk/neurodegenerative-diseases/multiple-sclerosis/
https://forms.gle/5YTssp4pDVFciYEe9
This makes for compelling listening as Bron and Hannah make sense of real experiences of MS loss; before critiquing well-known models of loss (grieving) and; evaluating the complex nature of repeated cycles of loss when one lives with an incurable, unpredictable condition (such as) Multiple Sclerosis.
“Immediately upon diagnosis I was catastrophising.” 
“Psychologically I’d lost everything … I was never going to be able to pursue the career I wanted to …. Or fulfil my role as a mother … I felt like I was going through the process of mourning”
“What I was crying for, in that moment … I was mourning over the loss of myself and [loss of] being able to fulfil everything that I wanted to”
“I was catastrophising really because I was able to fulfil the roles that I wanted to but I just had to find alternative ways to deal with it … even though I did lose ‘me’ and my identity as ‘me without MS’ I found alternative ways to manage myself”.
“I’ve lost the ability to do [things] in the way I want to ... or the way that I feel I should be able to do [them]”
“It’s not a physical loss … all my losses were a loss I was experiencing in my head”
“It’s a  big threat to who I am now and who I wanna be”
 
Copyright: Bron Webster 2020
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Email: hello@multiplesuccess.co.uk
Socials: Multiple Success
TRANSCRIPT
And
so today I'm really privileged to have Hannah Morris with me, Hannah's a person with Ms. And we I came across Hannah in relation to some work that she is doing at the moment, which was really interesting to me and it really fits in terms of what I'm looking at, for this series, all about emotions with multiple sclerosis. So we're going to be looking at lots of exciting things. Probably not. You might wonder, why are we talking about loss when you've got multiple sclerosis, but we're going to so welcome Hannah Morris. Thanks for being here.
Thank you for having me, Bron. I'm very much looking forward to talking about this very interesting topic that is often overlooked. When we talk about Ms. I'm really looking forward to talking about it in this session today.
Fabulous. Thank you. So, Hannah, just to get us started with the interview, Could you just tell us a little bit about your own ms story, and maybe what it is you're working on now?
Yep. So I've had I was diagnosed about nine and a half years ago now. And but I would have had actually the worst of my symptoms were before I was even diagnosed. And so I was going through actually very stressful time in my life, which is what I do. triggered my Ms. Actually, I was studying I was working two jobs I had three children at the time we just moved houses. So there was a lot going on in my life. And so I started experiencing symptoms of vertigo was the first symptom I had. But I tend to get a bit of vertigo anyway prior to the MS with a cold. So I just attribute it to that didn't think anything of it had a few other little minor signs as well. didn't really think anything of it, but the vertigo eventually got very severe that I became bed bound to the point that it did push me to go and see a doctor then once it was stable enough for me to leave the house. So I saw a doctor and apparently she'd suspected that I might have MS at the time, but I hadn't realized that that's what she was suspect,