MS Strength

Back to 1999. So I went for a year without any problems after the numb lower back incident. I was working as a physical rehab aide while going to school for diagnostic ultrasound. The rehab field is fun and it’s meaningful because you can see people progress and get better. On the flip side, it can be very physically demanding and the shortage of healthcare workers, particularly nurses, is not helping the situation. So I was running around by day, physically wearing myself down, then going to classes at night, 4 times a week. The ultrasound program was one that was quick and intense, to get technologists out and working after a year of training and then a short clinical experience.

I have noticed a pattern for myself in that I tend to relapse sometime between April and July. Might be the onset of the warm weather. So as the heat was rising in June of that year, my left leg began to feel weak and tingly, from foot to knee. The leg also felt cold, like I had bad circulation. I plugged on, but I went to my dad’s primary doctor, who sent me for an EMG, a test that supposedly checks for nerve conduction. The exam was a bit uncomfortable, because it involved levels of electrical shocks and multiple needles stuck into my leg. When the results came back, they were negative. The primary doctor never scheduled me for anything else, and I again chalked it up to some weird side-effect from having had Lyme disease. The leg weakness/numbness went away in a month’s time.

At that point I wasn’t my biggest health advocate because I didn’t know any better.

Okay, I want to digress from time to time, just to keep this MS site colorful. My husband and I have recently taken to fishing in our nearby river— it’s about 3 houses down from us at the end of our street (we have a fantastic view from our covered porch.) Bill and I go around the guard fence and walk down to our tiny little shore, sometimes bringing our chairs and some beer.

This is the first season I have persistently fished with him, because I got lucky and snagged a white perch one night purely by chance. Now I’m HOOKED. Ha… So we go down to our favorite spot a few nights a week and I have caught 4 fish in the last month. It takes my mind off of being sleepy from stress and each time I catch another fish, I am that more determined to catch more. I have also caught 2 baby large mouth bass in a local pond.

Fishing is great for concentration, patience, balance, upper arm strength, and the soul. It’s also FUN.

Today I vividly remember my first MS attack, although at the time I didn’t think much about it. It seemed pretty subtle. It was a little over ten years ago, and I was living outside of the Philadelphia area, in my mid-twenties, and trying to figure out what sort of career I wanted. Being an English major can be a blessing and a curse because it keeps your options open, but it doesn’t give you very specific career skills, unless you become a journalist or some other type of writer. So at the moment I was investigating health/human service ideas, because I enjoy helping people.

I was living in a studio apartment and I remember waking up one morning and feeling like I had slept funny on my lower back. One small area on my left side was tingling with pins and needles like it was still asleep. About the size of my palm. Except this area didn’t “wake up” and it continued to feel like this for about a week.

Now I didn’t have good health insurance at the time, and about a year earlier I had contracted Lyme disease because I was working outdoors in a region that has a population of deer ticks only second to that of Lyme, Connecticut (where Lyme disease is thought to have begun.) I had been quickly treated with a strong course of antibiotics, and I believed I had made a full recovery. But in the back of my mind, when this pins and needles event happened in my lower back, I began to tell myself that it could have been a minor side-effect from having had Lyme disease, because this infection can cause tingling and numbness as well. So I chalked the whole tingling episode up as a small inconvenience. Plus the whole thing went away within a week like it never even happened. No harm.

At this point I knew absolutely nothing about multiple sclerosis.