MS Strength

In the year 2000, I suffered a definite new attack in the summer as I was finishing ultrasound school and starting my clinical experience. My left leg again became tingly, somewhat numb, and weak, but this time it extended from my toes all the way up to my hip. At times I felt like I had a lead leg! This went on intermittently for about a month, and I didn’t reveal this information to anyone but my close family members, who also thought it had to do with having had Lyme disease. I had no specific primary doctor at the time, since I believed myself to be relatively well, and my mind went back to the last general practitioner I saw who did no further investigation after the negative EMG (nerve) test. I went on with my ultrasound clinical experience as my left leg eventually returned to “normal.”

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.

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.