It is never good news getting diagnosed with a chronic disease. I’ll admit, though — when I got diagnosed with MS back in 2005, while it sucked, I eventually discovered that it came with a few very small, very strange conveniences. One of them was a legitimate excuse to get out of things I didn’t want to do anyway. Somebody says, “Hey Kris, I need help
moving furniture.” It is completely true that carrying couches up and down stairs is not safe for me. But here’s the thing: I didn’t want to do that before MS either. Now I just don’t have to feel guilty about saying no. MS did the emotional labor for me.
Parking at the university is another one. Parking at every Cal State is terrible, but there is usually accessible parking somewhere near the building, so you learn to appreciate whatever tiny silver linings you can find. Would I call that a privilege of being disabled? Kind of, but only in the loosest possible sense. I would much rather be able to walk a few hundred more feet without depending on a cane, walker, or scooter than have the closer parking space. The parking is convenient. The reason I need it is not.
Then there are the people who haven’t seen you in a while and forget what you’re actually dealing with. They remember the version of you who could stay out late, play sports, walk all over the place, and generally behave like your legs were reliable employees. Even stranger are the people you meet for the first time who seem genuinely surprised that you talk like a regular person, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. I was baffled by that one when I first started using mobility aids. Apparently there is some stereotype floating around that once a cane enters the picture, your vocabulary is supposed to leave. I would be sitting there having a completely normal conversation, and you could almost see somebody recalibrating: Oh. He’s funny. He has opinions. He knows things. Yes. The scooter did not eat my personality.
That disconnect creates some pretty funny situations. You’ll be at a work retreat and somebody says, “You’re gonna love this one, Ealy — there’s zip-lining, rock climbing.” And I’m thinking, okay, zip-lining I might be able to pull off with some help. Strap me in correctly and let gravity do the heavy lifting. Rock climbing, though? That feels ambitious. Then they ask why, I point to whatever I’m using that day — walker, cane, mobility scooter, rotating cast depending on my mood — and you can see the realization arrive a few seconds late: “Oh yeah. I forgot.” Honestly, I never know whether to be amused or flattered. For a few minutes, they forgot too.
And for a while, so did I. Before my MS progressed, I could walk completely independently. No aids, no assistance, nothing. By 2019 I used a cane, but only sometimes — and here’s the part that sounds made up but isn’t: after a few drinks, there were nights when I actually seemed to balance better without it. Three drinks in, somehow steadier than I had been sober. Get properly drunk, though, and the experiment ended exactly the way you would expect: drunk plus MS, and gravity wins. It took several doctors before one finally explained what was happening. He described it as a kind of “temporary neurological dampening effect” — moderate alcohol acting as a central nervous system depressant and briefly quieting some of the muscle overactivity and neurological noise interfering with my coordination. No alcohol, impaired balance. Modest alcohol, temporarily better. Too much alcohol, back to being a cautionary tale.
He also told me that other people with MS have described similar paradoxical experiences, although nobody is writing “three vodka sodas” onto a prescription pad anytime soon. More importantly, he explained that the little sweet spot I had stumbled into existed before my MS progressed further. As the disease advances, the permanent damage can eventually outweigh whatever temporary benefit that dampening effect once produced. Which is the clinical way of saying: neat trick, but don’t build your future around it.
Whatever temporary benefit that dampening effect used to give me eventually disappeared. Which is the polite clinical way of saying: the trick stopped working.
That’s where the surgery comes in.
In 2022, I had a subdural hematoma — a slow brain bleed nobody caught until one day I suddenly couldn’t get up. I needed emergency surgery that lasted nearly four hours, and I woke up with staples in my head like a piece of IKEA furniture that had been reassembled in a hurry after somebody threw away page six of the instructions. The surgery happened the same day Bob Saget died, which felt unnecessarily dramatic even by brain-surgery standards. I had just survived somebody opening my skull, and the first thing the world had to tell me was that America’s Dad didn’t make it. Even my own near-death experience somehow got bumped to the second story.
My doctors were optimistic. They thought that once I recovered, I’d get back to my old baseline — the “sometimes need the cane” era, which in hindsight now feels like my athletic prime. For about a month, they were right. I felt like myself again. I went right back to yoga, the elliptical, all of it, cocky enough to think I had somehow out-recovered both brain surgery and multiple sclerosis at the same time. Apparently my body found that confidence irritating.
Then my walking got worse than it had ever been. Not “back to baseline” worse. Worse than baseline had ever been. The fatigue became so extreme that some days I genuinely cannot walk the thirty feet from my couch to the kitchen to get a snack, which is a deeply disrespectful distance for a kitchen to be when you are hungry. I still deal with that more often than I am comfortable admitting. There are things I no longer do unless my wife is with me — not necessarily because I need her to catch me, but because she can read the tiny signs of distress on my face before I have to say anything. Everybody else needs an explanation. She doesn’t. There is something comforting about that, but also something exhausting about having to narrate your own decline in real time just so other people understand what they are looking at.
Right about now, you are probably reading this either relieved that I have gone this long without talking politics or increasingly suspicious that I am about to. Maybe you are even pissed that I have not gotten there yet. But this is the Thinking Class, and eventually all of this has to earn its politics. Also, apparently I have a professional obligation to find some way to piss off conservatives, so I might as well be myself.
I started college in 1999. At eighteen, it never crossed my mind that I would be in my forties choosing between a cane, a walker, and a scooter depending on what kind of day my nervous system had decided to have. I dropped out for a while and worked factory jobs — lifting boxes, ripping tags off literal cleaning rags for reasons I still do not fully understand. Not shirts. Not pants. Rags. Somewhere there was apparently a booming market for tag-free rectangles of fabric, and for a while I was helping keep that economy alive.
Then came call-center work, which was an improvement mainly because I got to sit down while pretending to be deeply invested in products I would not have bought with somebody else’s money. I would spend entire shifts manufacturing excitement about cookware like my life had been changed by a nonstick skillet. “And this set comes with three lids!” Fantastic. Alert the media. Somewhere along the way I learned how to sound genuinely thrilled about kitchenware that meant absolutely nothing to me, which, in retrospect, was probably useful training for a future career involving meetings.
I had MS symptoms before I was officially diagnosed in 2005, and throughout that period I was racking up medical bills while working jobs with lousy benefits, watching the debt accumulate before I even had a name for what was wrong with me. The Affordable Care Act — Obamacare, if you prefer the name Republicans still say like somebody keyed their car — was never a cure-all. It was barely enough. But barely enough matters when the alternative is nothing, and when you are already bleeding financially, even slowing the bleeding counts as relief.
What is funny, in retrospect, is that I did not go back to school because I had some grand plan to build a career around my brain before my body stopped cooperating. I went back because I wanted the degrees. I still assumed all the other jobs I had done would always be there if I needed them. Hell, while I was working on my master’s degree, I was also doing delivery work, and the money was actually pretty good. There was a lot of getting in and out of the car, carrying things, running around town, but at the time my body could still handle it. Grad school, on the other hand, was doing its best to kill me financially and occasionally psychologically. There were plenty of nights when I looked at tuition, looked at whatever paper I was supposed to be writing, looked at the money I was making delivering, and thought: I could just quit this shit and do deliveries full time.
Fortunately, I did not.
Because years later, delivery work would not even be an option for me. My balance eventually got bad enough that constantly getting in and out of a car, carrying packages, navigating stairs and spending hours moving around would have gone from “pretty good money” to “excellent way to end up on somebody’s Ring camera falling into a hedge.” The factory jobs were gone too. Yard work in the California sun? Absolutely not. Somewhere along the way, without realizing it, those degrees I occasionally considered abandoning became the reason I could still work at all. Teaching and writing did not just give me a career. They gave me a way to keep earning a living when the kind of work I once assumed would always be available to me stopped being physically possible. Without that education, there is a very real chance I would have been applying for disability instead of teaching political science.
That is part of why I appreciate being able to teach online this fall. I live at least thirty miles from every Cal State where I teach, and something my business psychology instructor told us on the very first day of class has stayed with me ever since: your workday does not begin when you clock in. It begins when you get up, shower, get dressed, get in the car and start heading to work, and it does not end until you are back inside your house. Your employer may only pay you for the hours in the middle, but the rest of that time still belongs to the job. At eighteen or nineteen, that sounded like one of those professor lines you nod at because you assume it will be on the exam. Now, with MS, I understand exactly what he meant. A thirty-mile commute takes something out of everybody. My nervous system just sends me the invoice immediately.
The good news is that the Cal States and California community colleges generally provide excellent medical benefits, and I know how fortunate that makes me. The less charming news is that “excellent medical benefits” does not mean your insurance company suddenly becomes excited about paying for expensive medicine. I take the brand version of a drug called Ampyra, which helps people with MS walk better and, in my case, helps when my muscles start spasming — or, as I have been known to describe it, when my legs start “spazzing out.”
I used that phrase once and somebody informed me that “spazzing out” was derogatory toward the spasm community. I did not know there was a spasm community, which was particularly surprising considering I apparently belonged to it. I told her, “Well, it’s a good thing I’m part of that community, otherwise I’d sound like an insensitive jackass.” So, with all due respect to my fellow members of the spasm community, sometimes my legs spazz out. I feel like my membership card gives me at least limited usage rights.
The important part is that I need the brand version specifically. More than one neurologist has told me the generic does not work as well for me. There was a time when getting it approved was fairly routine. Increasingly, the process feels like I am trying to convince somebody that functioning legs are not an unnecessary luxury upgrade. The medication costs money, and apparently somewhere inside an insurance office there is a spreadsheet asking whether my nervous system really needs the premium package.
And this is where my own story runs directly into politics.
I have mostly given up trying to convince MAGA voters that supporting Trump and politicians like him necessarily conflicts with their economic interests. I do not think that argument reaches a lot of people anymore because economics is not always the thing doing the motivating. For a portion of that coalition, race, immigration, sexuality, gender and the promise of restoring a particular social order matter enough that they are willing to accept economic consequences along with it. They may lose something themselves and still consider the bargain worthwhile if they believe the policies are hurting people they think should have less. That is a much harder political problem than simply showing somebody a chart and saying, “See? Your healthcare costs more now.”
Healthcare makes that contradiction especially difficult to ignore. Roughly four in ten Medicaid and CHIP enrollees are white and non-Hispanic, which means millions of people who benefit from these programs live in the very communities where Republicans continue winning enormous numbers of votes. The tariffs get plenty of attention because people can see prices change at the store. Healthcare cuts are sneakier. They spread. When people lose Medicaid coverage, they do not suddenly stop getting sick. Hospitals still treat them, uncompensated care rises, and those costs do not disappear into the atmosphere. They work their way through hospitals, insurers, employers and eventually the rest of us. Even someone like me, sitting here with what I would genuinely describe as excellent employer-sponsored insurance, does not live in a separate healthcare economy.
That is why the fights over the ACA, Medicaid and insurance subsidies are not abstract policy arguments to me. Marketplace premiums are already up sharply for 2026 as enhanced subsidies disappear, millions of people are projected to lose coverage, and people with the least financial cushion will absorb the hardest blows. But the effects do not politely stop at the income line. Healthcare is one giant, irritatingly interconnected ecosystem. You can have a good job, good insurance and a stack of degrees on the wall, and somewhere an insurance company can still decide it would like to have a spirited debate about whether your legs really need the medication your neurologist prescribed.
I wish Democrats were better at explaining any of this without making healthcare sound like something you need a minor in public policy just to understand. Most people do not need another seventeen-page white paper titled Strengthening Access Through Sustainable Coverage Frameworks. They need somebody to say: this is what they are changing, this is what it is going to cost you, and this is what happens when your kid gets sick on a Tuesday. Fortunately, people like Mamdani and AOC seem to understand that politics works better when normal human beings can figure out what the hell you are talking about. Healthcare policy ultimately comes down to two places everybody understands: your body and your bank account.
And then there is RFK Jr., who remains Secretary of Health and Human Services because apparently American politics decided we were not doing enough experimental casting. The polling is fascinating. Six in ten voters disapprove of his performance, but among MAGA supporters his approval is around 88 percent. Even his own MAHA crowd is more complica…
