You might be wondering, what’s the big deal about getting a flu shot? For some people with MS, it’s a Las Vegas crapshoot-type deal.

My younger son and I were sitting in the stands at Stewart Stadium that fall, watching the Weber State Wildcats play football. I noticed I had trouble focusing at distance, on the game action. Great. Another MS symptom? So, back to the neuro’s office the following week. My right eye was not tracking properly, kind of wobbling. He told me I’d better consider starting one of the MS-fighting drugs.

Big decision. At that time, there were three drugs that studies had shown were partially effective in blunting the severity or preventing MS flareups. Because a flare can cause irreversible damage, the ongoing recommendation was, take the drugs. However, the downside was significant too. They were (and still are) nauseatingly costly, even with health insurance; they didn’t seem to help some people much at all; and the side effects were not negligible.

I decided not to drug up. My thinking was, I had not had any show-stopper MS symptoms, the kind that put you in a wheelchair or blind you, for instance. The recommended drugs also caused severe flu-like symptoms for a time after administration. And it would have cost $250 a month out of pocket.

That was dice roll No. 1. My second gamble came soon after. Flu season was approaching and I asked the neuro if it was OK to get a flu shot. He noted that flu and other serious illnesses were an additional danger for MS patients because the viruses strain the immune system and may even play a role in triggering autoimmune attacks. But my doctor said he subscribed to the line of thought that flu shots also were a risk, because they contain dead virus components. “It’s dead virus, but it’s still virus,” he said. I checked with my family doc, who said he doubted the shot would be an extra risk. Plus, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society recommended sufferers get the vaccination (it still does, even the swine flu shot too).

I got the shot. Dice roll No. 2.

When I used to go to Las Vegas with relatives years ago, I always lost. I liked to play blackjack, but I imposed a $20-per-day limit on myself. I’d invariably lose $20 in less than an hour and I’d spend the rest of the day sipping drinks and watching my relatives play on.

Yes, you guessed it. I rolled snake eyes on both MS gambles.

About a week after receiving the flu shot, wham! Another MS attack. This one struck my left side, hard. I experienced severe numbness and tingling in my face, arm, torso and leg, plus significant weakness in my arm and leg. My upper arm was the worst. It felt like it had a shop vise clamped around it. The sensation of pressure was very weird.

Back to the neuro. He said it appeared to him that the flu shot had excited my immune system, causing the fresh MS attack. I still resisted the medication route, but finally relented in December. After the arm-vise episode, I was growing terrified of a crippling attack.

I started on Avonex on New Year’s Eve, 1999. As Y2K struck, I was descending into a weekend of faux flu misery.

Oh. I’ve not had another flu shot in 10 years.

You’ve just got to love medical researchers. They discover, or prove, workings of our bodies and environments and thereby give us knowledge to live better. This is one thing I’m not too cynical about. I’ve lost count of the research findings that have led to a healthier me. I’m happy to make use of the info myself and help pass it along to others.  (It also doesn’t hurt my attitude that my oldest son, Derek, is a medical research graduate student at Rice University.)

Here’s the latest, “Well, yeah,” story I’m latching onto: According to this piece in WebMD Health News, researchers found that telomeres, DNA at the end of chromosomes, are longer in people who exercise regularly. It means on the molecular level, cells last longer, delaying the aging process and the effects of aging.

It gives me more intellectual backup for my intentionally oversimplified mantra, “keep moving or die.” I’ve convinced myself for 10 years that staying active might help me fend off a cliff-dive push from MS. Now I know that millions of little cell troopers inside me are working right by my side as I huff and puff on the treadmill.

1) We climbed Angels Landing. It’s a scary and spectacular mountain-goat creep up and across a ledge, hardly a trail. Slip or lose your balance and it’s a 1,000-foot drop to death. (Unfortunately, there have been two such falls this year.) My wife and I raised polite kids. Derek, my son, stepped aside to let some faster hikers pass. One more half-a-foot step aside and he might have slipped off the cliff. It terrified me then and I’ll never forget the horrible feeling of that moment.

2) Derek might not have needed to straggle on the cliff trail if he hadn’t needed to wait for his straggling father. I was gassed by the hike. Later that week, I trailed the field again as the Scouts and their leaders trudged upstream in stupendous Zion Narrows. The beautiful hike exhausted me. Derek had to pause several times for the geezer to catch up.

On the way back down the streambed, we stopped for a break in a sunbathed bend in the river. As I sat with my arms extended, welcoming the sun’s warmth after the long slog in the icy water, it slowly registered in my mind that my left arm was barely feeling the sunshine.

I sat, dumbfounded, then troubled. Shifting positions did nothing to change the lack of sensation. It became obvious I now had some bad news developing on my left side — the side unscathed by the previous year’s “transverse myelitis” episode. Soon it occurred to me to include on the new worry list my woeful efforts in failing to keep up with the Scout group on hikes. Sure, I was no longer the marathon runner of a decade earlier, but I wasn’t an inactive slug, either. I should have been able to keep pace with the kids. Something else was going on.

Back in my neurologist’s office the next week, he cocked his head back and forth with this pronouncement: “Best-case scenario, transverse myelitis. Worst-case scenario, multiple sclerosis.” I guess TM rarely has repeat attacks. But I think I knew at that point it was MS.

The MS diagnosis was confirmed after a spinal tap. Have you ever had one of those? Not recommended! It hurt like hell and caused a monstrous headache that lasted 10-12 hours. But the procedure gave the medical techs a chance to look around in a vial of my spinal fluid and find some nasty little MS antiobodies.

Next came the hardest part of having MS. It remains the hardest part, still. I had to tell my wife I had MS. I had to tell my children. I had to tell my parents, in-laws and other loved ones.  Seeing the pain in their eyes hurt me worse than any spinal tap could.

It was the morning after a long drive back from Scout camp with my older son in July 1998. I was wiped out from all the camping and heat and I staggered into the shower early the next morning to get ready for work. Funny, I couldn’t feel the water hitting the right side of my back. I turned, and the same with my right torso and right thigh. What the hell? Drying off only confirmed something was wrong. I scarcely felt the towel.

I went to work, expecting whatever odd numbness would be gone soon. By evening, the right side of my face was tingling. The ball of my right foot felt like it had a golf ball attached to it.

Next morning, my family doctor covered the basics and started talking about a referral to a specialist. I asked him what he thought might be going on. It might be something “kind of bad,” he said. Brain tumor and MS were at the top of the list. He sent me to a neurologist.

After more tests, the neurologist diagnosed me with transverse myelitis, which, oversimplified, is a type of one-attack disease similar to MS. I felt relieved there was no brain tumor or MS diagnosis. The neurologist sent me on my way and said, “I hope I won’t see you again.”

I continued to jog, play basketball and work out at the gym. I had a neurological problem but it seemed not to be a big deal. Until the following summer, on another Scout outing …

Next: Sunshine on my forearms in Zions Canyon.

1)       Create and cultivate Twitter accounts. Become the top-of-mind Twitter presence in your market. Attend and-or sponsor and help organize local “tweetup” groups and meetings. Join the area’s social media clubs.

2)       Set up a main Facebook account. Feed your news and blog streams to it and post and publicize your events. Create key fan pages under that main account (such as for movie reviews or any popular columnists).

3)       Add a social media directory to your site listing all your social media features. Consider making staff and community blogs part of the overall effort.

4)       Watch for similar opportunities with YouTube, etc. Pick the ones that make most sense to you. Many focus on Twitter and Facebook but that’s not the ultimate formula.

5)       Organizationally, this cannot be done effectively without some broad commitments in news, online, advertising and promotions departments. A couple of people in online cubicles can’t do it alone.

6)       Consider hiring a social media consultant for a couple days of staff training. They can help generate a kick start, especially among the news staff.

7)       The entire effort needs ongoing care and feeding. Some staffers will flame out, but others will catch the glow and won’t need much incentive.

8)       Ignore the rolling eyes, grimaces and insults from the unwilling.

9)       Watch your community awareness and footprint grow and expect significant growth in page views and visits.

10)     Improve news gathering and unsolicited news tips by making yourselves known on local Twitter lists. Start a “news junkies” Facebook fan page and invite contributions.

Our company’s Internet connection went down about 10 a.m. After the usual wailing and confusion, it was determined the problem rested at Qwest, our ISP. The IT guys remained on hold and in the dark by the time I decided to head over to the gym. Most outages like this are resolved quickly, so, I figured, go get a workout and come back to resumed connectivity.

At least the workout was fine. I jog-walked the normal 2.7-mile lunchtime route. Made it back without a seizure (that’s a feeling of relief possibly comparable to getting through a car wreck without a scratch). Cooling down, I strolled into the gym’s showers. No hot water. Great. The shocking cold cleanup fit right in with this Monday.

Back at the office, uh-oh. The ‘Net’s still down. Turned out it was down until 4 p.m., rounding out this Monday from hell.

Postscript: We found out the next day in the Qwest support staff’s postmortem report to us that apparently someone in the Qwest Ogden HQ bumped a rack, severing our connection, and did not notice it. Worse, they had to send a guy from Salt Lake with a repair part. I spent the rest of the week passing along to co-workers my exaggerated story: “Some guy with a big ass took down our Internet service.”