Home > MS Experience > Saying “Yes” Until I Can’t

Saying “Yes” Until I Can’t

By Meredith O’Brien
April 14, 2021

Have I taken on too much?

I ask myself this question as I sit and stare at the queue of dozens of ungraded college papers. I am teaching 44 students asynchronously who have weekly work that needs to be graded as well as weekly videos I need to record for their viewing pleasure. Additionally, I teach 37 students live, twice a week, whose first set of seven-page papers recently landed into my university digital account with a loud thump, heard only by me. There are also the seven students I teach in a graduate-level writing class I agreed to take on after a colleague had to leave two weeks into the semester.

What have I done?

I now teach journalism and writing on a part-time basis for two different universities. I adore teaching. I’ve been doing it for many, many years now and it never gets old. But the way I teach is labor-intensive. Just ask my husband – an engineer by training – who cannot stop himself from trying to concoct ways to lighten my load, to make my class prep and grading more efficient. Silly man. I have always taught and graded in ways that take way more time than most. I can’t help myself. I want to provide students with the kind of input I always craved when I was a student and to update course material so it remains relevant to my students, whom I hope to inspire.

When I was diagnosed with MS in 2014, my temporary, full-time, two-year teaching contract at a different school had recently concluded. This was serendipitous because I wasn’t sure how I’d fare after a severe MS flare landed me in the hospital and I was starting a course of a disease modifying medication that had potentially severe side effects (luckily, I wound up adjusting the medicine just fine).

It took me a year, until the fall of 2015, to muster the courage to step in front of a class again. But this time, I was an MS-affected educator who had heat sensitivity, occasional cognition challenges and fatigue. While I was thrilled to be teaching students about the day’s news during such an incredibly newsy time, I was secretly worried about how I’d be able to get through the lectures, engage the nearly 50 students and promptly grade their work.

I must have done a decent job because I was later offered two sections of that course per semester. While it was a part-time teaching gig, it felt to me – because of the time-intensive way I teach and grade, in addition to the MS fatigue that slowed me down even further – more like full-time. I felt like the turtle. Slow but steady.

By the fall of 2020, I was asked if I wanted to teach three classes at the university in one semester. When you teach on a part-time basis, you can’t really turn down opportunities if you want to keep getting them. I agreed to three courses and, by December, felt like a wrung-out towel, drained physically and emotionally. I dragged myself over the New Year’s finish line.

In the spring, I was kind of relieved to be asked to teach only two classes because I needed to regroup, to restore my energy, to sleep, particularly as nocturnal, relentless MS leg cramps were routinely interrupting my slumber, and fatigue was affecting my concentration. Then I received the call about teaching the MFA writing class in a program for which I really wanted to work. I couldn’t say no.

Which brings me to this moment. With all these papers – a nonstop tsunami of them – pouring into my digital queue. With the office hours each week. With my lectures/discussions, accompanied by the presentation slides I create for each class meeting. With the awkward weekly videos I record for my asynchronous class. I am crossing my fingers that my MS continues to play nice, because right now, I’m feeling a tad bit overwhelmed.

Have I taken on too much? Maybe, but it’s doable because, for now, MS is not making my working life impossible. I may not always be able to say that. So, while I can, I will say, “Yes.” Until I can’t.

Meredith O’Brien

Meredith O’Brien is a Boston area writer and journalism lecturer. She is a die-hard Red Sox fan who lives with her husband, three kids and two noisy dogs. Her fourth book, “Uncomfortably Numb: A Memoir,” about her MS experience, was published in March 2020. Follow her on Twitter @MeredithOBrien, or visit her website at mereditheobrien.com.  

Related Posts

Silhouette of a person against the sunset.

Till MS Do Us Part

For one blogger, an MS diagnosis became a chance to rewrite their story.

Two speech bubbles with a United Kingdom and a United States flag.

Across the Other Side of the Pond, but Connected Through MS

An activist in the U.K. discusses the challenges that the Black MS community faces here… Read More

A Black healthcare professional examines and MRI brain scan.

Can Black People Get MS?

A blogger debunks the myth that Black people are less likely to have multiple sclerosis.

Advertisement