Living with Multiple Sclerosis

The first symptom I noticed was in January 2006 when I was taking my 2 year old daughter for a walk. I suddenly felt numbness and tingling in the bottom of my left foot. I started to become extremely fatigued; so much so that it was a struggle to make it home. Over the course of the next month, I continued to have numbness and tingling in my left foot and leg and also my left arm and once in the side of my face.

I experienced a sense of vertigo at one point while walking through the mall and there was the unrelenting fatigue. I had memory problems and would be in the middle of a conversation and could not remember a basic word that I used every day. This all just hit me so suddenly and I got scared so I saw my doctor. She said my symptoms were indicitive of MS and ordered an MRI It came back showing multiple lesions but my doctor was “not ready” to diagnose me.

Eventually, my symptoms went away and I had about 9 months with no symptoms whatsoever. But 3 months ago, the debilitating fatigue set in again and instead of numbness in my legs, I began to have extremely painful aching in both legs. I am constantly having muslce tics all over my body and a pain in my abdomen that causes me to double over and comes out of nowhere. The fatigue is the worst though.

My doctor ordered another MRI which showed something she called “increased signal.” She says now that she doesn’t think it’s MS but she doesn’t know what else it could be. So I guess I will be going for a second opinion now.