Uneasy truce? Oh no sir!

Recently I wrote how I had realised that MS had become my excuse for not doing things that before diagnoses I would have done. It was a tale of regret and grieving.
But yesterday I discovered that MS is actually sometimes (And I only mean the once in a while, count your blessings for small mercies sometimes) good for something.
It is absolutely brilliant at giving you an instant reason for some random, innocuous and not-serious health complaint that may strike.
Take the common garden cold for example. Pre-diagnoses days, I would have sniffed my way limply into the chemist, bought a mountain of flu remedies and tissues and felt extremely sorry for myself while dabbing vaseline onto the end of my sore and red snout.
I would have moaned to anyone who would listen that this wasn't just a cold - this was flu and they had better feel sorry for me.
Now, when a cold strikes my reaction is this: "Bloody MS - I wouldn't have caught this cold if it wasn't for the MS." And I find myself angrily fighting the cold blaming it all on my old friend MS (which on this occasion hasn't actually done anything wrong). But it feels so good to remind my monster that I hate it and it can think again if it even thinks that its home in me is going to be anything but a dark, cold place to be.
I'll give you another example. Recently I've been suffering awful achy knees. I've been moaning about it constantly.
Have I been to the GP to discover the reason? No.
Do I tell myself that it is probably an age-related thing? No.
Does the thought that as a teenager I managed to strain the ligaments in both knees on separate occasions ending up on crutches both times and it is probably the niggling of these old injuries? No of course not.
What I have done though, is during my moaning about how sore my knees feel is say: "Bloody MS - it's got to be something to do with that." Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
But yet again, I remind my MS monster that I seriously am not a good place to be setting up camp and that it needs to change locations fast.
It's quite liberating to realise that for everything that goes wrong now, I have a fantastic reason to shout loudly into the face of MS that it needs to move on now, there's nothing to see here.
And it is even better to remind my MS monster that we do not have an uneasy truce. Oh no sir! There is no truce at all. In fact there is only one four word sentence that sums up our current situation.
We are at war.