My name is Simon Burall, I live on the south coast. I started this blog as a running diary and a place to blog sporadically about things that interest me . As you’ll see, I’ve not been running recently. I can’t really blame my recent diagnosis as I stopped well before all that started.

I’ve started to use the blog as a way of musing about my MS, it’s effects and as a place to start documenting what I’ve learnt about it from the scientific literature. But if you’re reading this for a properly informed view please don’t. While I have a science degree, focusing on biology, this is nearly 3 decades old, and the science has moved on a lot. Coupled to this is the fact that I don’t have the time, and often the energy, for in-depth research, and finally am restricted to the literature that is publicly available.

The risk of a little knowledge being a bad thing is exacerbated by the fact that I’m approaching the literature in magpie mode. I’m flitting from the latest question that interests me personally and then moving on. The science behind the causes of MS, the symptoms and the treatments is wide ranging from the functioning of the immune system, biochemistry, cellular biology, genetics and psychology, and more fields besides. I don’t have a firm grasp of the latest science in any of these fields.

What I’m hoping to do is to get myself into the position of being able to ask the specialist MS team looking after my care more informed questions. By writing what I learn down in a semi-public space I’m hoping to help myself to better understand what I’m learning, and maybe it’ll help others out there too struggling with similar things to me.

Copyright

All images and text are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon my text and images non-commercially, as long as I am credited and their new creations are licenced under the identical terms.

You can find me on Mastodon here.