"I hope you are able to find new hope while living with this disease."

This is one of the things I just don't understand. This person is a stranger to me. She just happened upon my blog, and decided that I was a great candidate to give hope to other people neither of us know because I have self-identified as someone with MS.

You know what I have hope in?

Science.

I have hope that the collective fundraising groups are throwing more money at research and science than they are building websites to build hope.

Hope is a false profit.

Science, that's got the chance to really change things.

I don't believe that there's a "cure" for MS that doesn't include completely changing one's immune system. Fucking with DNA, wholesale stem cell transplants; that's where the hope is.

It's not on a website full of platitudes.

I'm still well enough that if they found a way to permanently halt the progression of my disease, I'd be okay. I could live for the next 50 like that. No problem. I think that that kind of cure isn't that far away. I suspect that we'll be there by the time I'm old enough for CPP.

It's the reversing of MS related damage... that's going to be where the money is.

Once they get there, the next thing is to prevent MS from happening in the first place.

My hope is in science, not in a bunch of people I don't know.