Living with Multiple Sclerosis

I woke up one morning, played with my cat for a few minutes and started driving to work. While I was driving, my left arm began tingling, a few minutes later, I couldn’t feel the left side of my face. I’ve had tingling before on my right side, so I thought it would just go away. As I was sitting at work, I noticed it wasn’t going away, and it seemed to be getting worse, a little numb. I went to the ER. While I was waiting, I realized that I could not sense temperature on the left side of my mouth when I drank anything hot or cold.

They ordered an MRI, and after waiting for a while, the ER doctor came back and told me she wanted to admit me so I could see a neurologist. They did a spinal tap and I was sent off to wait 2 weeks for the results. My checkout papers from the hospital said, “possible ms”. The spinal tap results confirmed the diagnosis.

Since the diagnosis, I’ve had a few days where I felt completely normal throughout most of the day. The tingling and numbness on my left side is completely gone, but I have weakness on the right side that comes and goes. I have random back pain along my spine. The hardest part about all of this is not knowing what to expect, as it seems there is no normal with MS It’s random. You don’t know what symptom will present or when. You don’t know how long it will be present. That’s almost worse than most of the symptoms themselves.