A Good Life with Bad Muscles — Retha De Wet

Scientific literature clearly establishes that weather, particularly temperature, can influence the severity of myasthenia gravis symptoms. Cold weather is infamous for being worse for pain and hot weather results in reduced muscle strength. Living in Africa, hot weather is no scarcity. This means that I dread the coming of…

What is the first thing you do when you wake up? You might have answered, “I take a shower” or “I drink coffee.” However, the first thing everyone does when waking up is to open the eyes. It is a movement so simple that most of us take it for granted…

Sleeping is necessary to keep your body functional. Once deprived of it, you learn just how important sleep is to behave how you want to behave. Without it, you stray from your desired character. With myasthenia gravis, sleeping becomes as important as honey is to a bee. My…

Traveling can be an anxiety-provoking experience. There are so many things to remember, including those that are necessary to board the plane. I recently embarked on a trip to Europe, which is quite the distance from South Africa, and learned many valuable lessons. The first thing I learned is the…

Finding a viable treatment option for a rare disease can be a long-term, frustrating struggle. Being rare, the disease itself is often poorly understood by the medical community, making it even more difficult to treat. Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disease, which means the immune system attacks healthy tissue —…

If I have learned one thing from life, it is that people always pass judgment. We judge things we think we understand, and sometimes we judge things we don’t even want to understand. I judged myasthenia gravis as a disease that can easily be treated and thought it wouldn’t…

Life with myasthenia gravis can be incredibly frustrating. At times, it feels like no one understands my battle and what I’m forced to go through just to lead a functional life. This frustration is especially emphasized when I attempt things that my peers do with a whole lot less effort,…

Few activities send endorphins rushing through my body like jogging. Exercise has many benefits, both mental and physical. This fact became apparent to me when I could no longer exercise due to weak and fatigable muscles caused by myasthenia gravis (MG). Before the onset of my symptoms, I…

Struggling with physical and mental health is challenging. In my case, myasthenia gravis shined a light on underlying anxiety, and now I am in a relationship with both. I battle both muscle weakness and my own mind. Often, it’s difficult to determine which of the two is causing my problems.

The emergency room has never been a particularly amicable place. It is an assembly point for people in discomfort searching for assistance with varying degrees of medical problems, from broken bones to food poisoning. However, if you have a rare disease like myasthenia gravis (MG) or a complicated medical…

Like most chronically ill people, I often get the line, “I don’t know how you do it.” To be completely honest, nor do I. I just do exactly as healthy people do. I wake up, get up, survive, and go to bed. On some days, I have an emotional breakdown in…

Hospital visits that end up going less than smoothly either make or break your spirit. Physical strength comes and goes in the lives of the chronically ill, but it’s our emotional toughness that gives us that mind-boggling endurance no healthy person can seem to comprehend. It is almost like a…