MS

This week (March 10-17) is Multiple Sclerosis week. Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an auto immune disease that affects the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord). 10,400 young adults ages 20 to 50 will be diagnosed this year. They will join the 400,000 adults with multiple sclerosis. I am a retired Physical Therapist with MS. I have worked with many of these young people with MS. I would like more people to understand how MS affects them and their families.

So what is happening to these young adults? Simply put the white cells in the person’s body mistake the myelin sheath covering the nerves for a foreign body and start attacking it. This attack is called a re-lapse. It may be a severe attack or a milder form. In either case the person’s body will repair the damage and they will recover. When the body has recovered this is called being in remission. This pattern may continue for years and years taking in multiple new areas and the body keeps trying to repair itself. Eventually the body will stop healing itself. At this time there will be a gradual loss of function in all the multiple areas that the nerves involved were sending that energy to.

Because MS is the number one disabler of young adults it makes this disease particularly troublesome. These are the ages when we are most productive. People are starting out on their careers, marriages, raising families etc. We all know of the energy required in all this. A person with MS just does not have the normal consistent reserves of energy of other young adults. Remember what is happening in their body!! Long before an overt form of any disability becomes apparent, MS is starting to erode away the quality of life of the person and the family of the person with MS.

Because MS is a very complex and eclectic disease it can be hard to relate to a person with MS. A person with MS has good days and bad days due to the nature of the disease. You may know a person who has visual problems and another person who has a problem walking. Some of you may know people who have balance or coordination problems. Others of you may know people with cognitive or speech problems. But remember the term multiple. Your friends may have some of these other problems too, because MS attacks the nerves in multiple areas of the brain and spinal cord. Where, when or how severe the attack and how much repair will be done is unique in every person. Therefore the accumulation of disability will vary also.

But the one symptom that all MS patients have is fatigue. This happens to the newly diagnosed (in fact it’s one of the early symptoms) and to the wheelchair user alike. This fatigue is unique to MS. It can be a debilitating fatigue of utter exhaustion coming out of the blue for no reason at all. And it can cause an increase in the symptoms of all the other damaged areas in their central nervous system. Like losses in vision, motor skills, coordination, cognition, speech, swallowing, etc.

Fatigue itself causes many people, myself included, to stop planning ahead or making commitments to events. Because you never know!

If you know of someone who has MS, and you want to be-friend them or to try to understand them better, please do. They are part of your community.