I've always tried to stay fit and healthy. I've always read ingredient lists on things in the grocery store, which always used to amuse my wife early in our relationship. Over the years her amusement briefly passed through a phase of anger and ridicule at my refusal to eat some things based on what I read, mostly directed at the extra cost of the things I wanted to buy. It seems that the shorter the ingredient list, the more costly the product. Eventually she came over to my way of thinking. I may be one of the few Anglo males who actually like the flavor and texture of tofu, courtesy of my wife who spent some of her early childhood in Japan. I've always preferred a high-protein, low carbohydrate diet made up of mostly fresh products. I try not to eat mammals, but birds and seafood are fair game.

I used to bike 9-12 miles several times a week and lift weights at the gym 2 or 3 times a week up until the end of Summer of 2000 when I became just too tired to do this any more. My weight was 130 pounds at age 20, 140 at age 30, and 150 at age 40, not bad for a guy who is 6 feet tall. I've had my blood pressure and cholesterol measured regularly over the last 10 years, with the blood pressure typically 100/60 and my cholesterol level typically around 130 with LDL in the 40s and HDL in the 50s. I don't smoke and only use alcohol occasionally. So what's up with this MS thing? Obviously being fit and healthy doesn't always prevent MS. Maybe I was able to put off the crisis point to so late in my life because I was so health conscious. Or maybe I was health conscious because in the back of my mind I knew that something was wrong and I had to work hard to compensate. It's hard to say.

Why did I work so hard to stay fit and healthy? In my 20s I would have answered "For the babes!" After my children were born my wife resented my taking time away from the family to go to the gym and life weights. But I was no longer doing it "for the babes" but for myself. I felt that exercising in my 30s was a form of insurance that could extend my life expectancy, and more importantly, improve the quality of my life both in the present and the future. After all, what's the use of living an extra few decades if you can't get a smile and some eye-contact from a pretty girl?

My wife once told me that one of her great-grandfathers was a sweet old man who died relatively young, in his 50s. Another of her great-grandfathers was a mean cranky old curmudgeon who lived into his 80s, which back then was no mean feat (pun not intended). Her theory was the crankier you are, the older you live. She then smiled sweetly and told me that I would probably live to be 100. Her smile turned to laughter when I replied "Well, that means that your mother will be immortal!"

One of the first questions that I asked when I was newly diagnosed was "How long can I expect to live?" Of course everybody would like to know how long they're going to live, but for me the question gained a new sense of urgency with the specter of MS in the background. I've read various figures on the web and in books, with worst-case figures of 1-5 years life expectancy for progressive MS. On average though it seems that MS sufferers can expect a reduction of life expectancy ranging from 5% to 15%. The higher figures are mostly from publications that predate the current immune-suppressant technology, so I would guess that the current average could be in the range 5-10%.

Let's start with the 1999 IRS Life Expectancy Table, which lists a life expectancy of 82.6 years for a person of my age. You might think that the government would use this figure to calculate things like Social Security so it ought to be accurate, but knowing how bureaucracies work we all know how likely that is, right? Next, I hit a search engine and looked for life expectancy calculators. There's a lot of them out there, and I found that the more questions the calculators asked, the higher the figure they gave as my life expectancy:

The life expectancy calculators asked questions about general health and lifestyle which have always been my strong points, so it figures that the more they ask, the better I look. Finally, I checked on RealAge, which purports to compute your "real age", that is, the age of your body taking into account the wear-and-tear caused by your lifestyle. Mine turned out to be 39.2 years, about 7% younger than my chronological age. I figure that by continuing to eat sensibly and exercise as much as I can given the constraints of my MS (allowing for the fatigue and the undesirability of raising my body temperature), the extra 7% that I gain in life expectancy might offset what I lose with MS. It looks like I can reasonably expect to live into my 80s, which is not a scary thing.

What is scary, however, is what my quality of life will be like. There is a significant probability that I may be immobile and fed through a tube by that point. But that is 30-40 years into the future. Perhaps by then MS will be cured and the neural damage repairable. Until then, I'm going to continue to consume lots of sushi, nuts, berries, fresh vegetables, tofu, and cranberry juice. Dead cows are off the menu, but European chocolate and cheese are on it. And I'm going to continue admiring the cute babes lifting weights in the gym. Otherwise, what's the use of living?