On the advice of Dr. Landis, I went to an information expo the National MS Society held in Arlington. “You never know,” he says, which is one of the many things doctors say off-handedly and don’t realize how they sound. The expo was more for doctors and specialists, but there were others like me—“the diagnosed,” as we were called a few times. Those of us there ran, or rather limped, the gamut. One guy was a body builder diagnosed in 1974 and there to proselytize some steroid drug. Aside from the Lou Ferrigno wannabe, there were also a lot of folks with aggressive cases, and that depressed the hell out of me. The wheelchair and walker brigade looking for some miracle cure.

It was held at the Howard Johnson’s across the highway from a water park Dan used to like called Wet ’n Wild. The main ballroom was a sign up for various clinical trials, and this is what Landis recommended I check out. Everything under the sun . . . there was ballroom dancing and ballet, and one Clockwork Orange guy who wanted to monitor how much your eye moved back and forth for a year. I almost registered for water aerobics—but it was all the way down by Parkland and I’m not going to jackass that far—lots of exercise and yoga studies, one was even meditation with a Buddhist monk.

There was a line out the door for interferon, word having spread quick that it was the most promising trial, but it was already filled by the time the expo had started and people were just signing up for waiting lists. I stayed away from the experimental drugs. Who the hell knows with this stuff, and the side effects could be worse than the disease. One drug called bifuobinase listed loss of bowel control as a possibility. Great, sign me up.

Someone might go into a room like this and think: Thank God they have so many people working on a cure for MS or trying to figure it out. But after an hour of hobbling around and pretending to be curious, I was left with a very sad realization: They have no idea what causes or cures this illness. It’s all shots in the dark.

And so this is my shot in the dark, this God forsaken trial where I’m taking heavy doses of vitamin D for thirty days. Truth be told, I signed up to keep my wife off my back, and it didn’t have an age cutoff or sound like something Dr. Frankenstein would suggest.

February 10