32 msfocusmagazine.org Life with MS I've always been a goal-oriented person. I knewvery early on in my life what I wanted to do as a career, and planned the steps needed in order to achieve the goal of completing a Ph.D. by the age of 30. To say I worked hard to achieve these goals is an understatement. But I did achieve them. I reached the goal of earning a Ph.D. by 30, and was diagnosed with MS just four short years later. You can imagine my absolute frustration and fear after being diagnosed with a disease that could easily rob me of the career I had spent my life working towards. Thankfully, I am still able to work full-time – with some accommodations. I am still as goal-oriented now as I was prior to the diagnosis. I am fairly well-versed in the Americans with Disabilities Act and so when it came time to apply for these accommodations at the workplace, I was able to do so without hesitation. However, two things affected me for quite some time: The first is guilt. The second was assumptions being made by others. I have accommodations to help with this disease, so if I am unable to lecture on campus, I am able to roll my face-to-face lecture course to an online format. It is an amazing accommodation to have when my legs decide to not to work very well. I can record my lecture at home, interact and engage with my studentsonlinethroughSkype,AdobeConnect, email, and so on. Teaching online is often assumed to be easy, but let me tell you – it isn’t. But the show must go on! In this way, students are able to benefit from the lecture, and what I am affordedwith this accommodation is the ability to work from home, and take the time to heal from either a relapse, or when fatigue strikes. It’s a win-win situation. However, guilt comes in when I have to use these accommodations. Even though I am actively working (but doing so at home), I feel incredibly guilty. I am frustrated that I cannot do the level of work that I would like to be doing on a daily basis. I am irritated that other colleagues who are healthy are barely doing what is required to get by. The bottom line is I want to work and this darn disease keeps me from doing that. And, then there is the other problem – the assumptions made from other colleagues are echoing loudly in my ears. When I initially received accommodations, I overheard a few people discussing the things we with MS hear quite frequently. “She doesn't look sick”, “She gets to work from home, must be nice,” and so on. I didn't bother addressing any of these assumptions. I expressed these frustrations to a good friend who is also a colleague, and we reframed this frustration to a joke of ‘how nice it must be for me to sit at home and eat bon-bons,justbecausemylegsweren'tworking!’ Asking for Accomodations: How I Adjusted By Darbi Haynes-Lawrence