It may surprise you to learn that I have multiple disabilities. I am the poster child for invisible illnesses, nice to meet you. In this series of blog posts, I am going to talk about what it is like being an adult content creator (or what I like to call myself, professional hot girl) and managing diseases which are debilitating on a daily basis. I am going to talk through them and I promise there will be a great big dollop of humour because I love having a laugh at myself. And what do I hope to achieve with this? Well, if you are a fan, I hope it will give you an insight what it takes to keep this (*gestures to the meatsuit I inhabit) running and looking as amazing as it does. I hope it will also open your mind to the fact that a lot of us professional hot people are managing a whole bunch of things that are completely invisible to the outsider. And if you are a fellow professional hot person with a disability, I hope this will help you feel like you are not alone.
What is MS?
I grew up in the 80s when MS was a pretty big deal. I remember the donation jar for the MS Society being on the counter of my mum and dads shop, but having no idea what it was, only that MS was bad enough to have lots of these donation jars kicking around, raising funds for research and cures. But I got the sense that people with MS were relegated to wheelchairs and their lives were pretty shit all in all.
Fast forward 30+ years and I still didn’t have much of an idea of what MS was when I was diagnosed with it in March 2020. The story of my diagnosis is a whole other story that I will save for another time, ok? Let’s just keep this first blog post simple and with a shorter length than an undergraduate philosophy essay…
MS stands for multiple sclerosis and is an auto-immune disease. What that means is that my immune system that instead of attacking nasty things that enter my body, it will attack my body itself. Different auto-immune diseases attack different parts of the body.
I have two auto-immune diseases, one that attacks my bowel and MS, which attacks my central nervous system.
Think about your central nervous system being a network of cables that run through your body, connected to your brain and whose job is to send signals back and forth from all over your body.
To work well, the central nervous system needs to be healthy and protected, so it is wrapped in a special sheath, like an electrical power cord, which makes sure the signals are sent accurately.
Like a power cord, if the sheath that surrounds your central nervous system is damaged, there will be problems getting the signal to travel to and fro.
In MS, the immune system attacks the special sheath around the central nervous system, creating sores (lesions) which then heal to become scars – hence the name “Multiple Sclerosis” meaning “Many Scars.”
How Does MS Affect You?
MS effects everyone in different ways. As you can imagine, not everyone has the same damage to their central nervous system in the same places. It is also a very complicated system, so different parts of it do different jobs. People’s symptoms of MS can be quite vague until the disease progresses to a point where the symptoms are more visible and diagnosable.
For me, I have had chronic fatigue for YEARS. Like not just tired, or exhausted but FATIGUED, which is the kind of tiredness that isn’t fixed by sleep. Your body feels encased in concrete.
I have also had issues with being very sensitive to the heat, pins and needles and numbness in one part of my body, headaches and constant pain that has no one source.
It was only when I became very unwell, and my symptoms became much worse, that I was diagnosed. I developed optic neuritis, which is an inflammation of the nerve cells in the eye, which caused me to lose sight, become incredibly painful and sensitive to light.
It is a symptom that a lot of people with MS have, and it is usually the reason people get to be diagnosed with the disease.
My fatigue then worsened, along with my heat sensitivity, difficulty with balance, brain fog and issues with moving my eyes independently of my head.
So, How Do You Do The Work You Do?
The thing with adult entertainment, and I am going to burst many people’s bubbles right now, is that it is exactly that; entertainment. And entertainment is comprised of a hell of a lot of smoke and mirrors and tricks to get the audience drawn in and to believe something is amazing and effortless. Therein lie the “How.”
Sometimes you might see a photo of me standing up, but I am propped against something.
I might be in enormous pain but I shut it off for the duration of the photo or push through it during a live show.
Or then I may just be less active than usual because if the body decides it does not want to work, there is no convincing it that you need to make clips today.
The smoke and mirrors of adult entertainment, and the flexibility that running my own business affords me, means I can do the work I do.
I sleep a lot, and I am generally running on empty and everything hurts, but I keep doing what I can. And most people are none the wiser.
Now that the preliminaries out of the way and you have a general idea of what may be going on behind the scenes, I can share some funny, tragic and weird stories and how the heck I live (and be sexy) with MS. Is it a terminal illness? Is there a cure? Is this why you complain about being so hot all the damn time? Stay tuned for my next post to know more…
Rem Sequence is an Australian adult content creator, blogger, and internationally published alt model. She has a background in psychology, philosophy and political science and worked in health and sex education, youth work and trauma counselling for almost two decades. Now, she works full time in the adult industry, as well as indulging her passion for arts, writing and music in numerous side projects.
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