Early Multiple Sclerosis Symptoms What it Feels Like

hello my dear friends and welcome my name is vicki hodge and this is even so it is well on my channel i share my thoughts about living well with chronic illness this does not mean that my thoughts are necessarily going to agree with your thoughts and it also does not mean that my thoughts are medical advice it just means that i'm thoughtful i'm starting with a huge disclaimer today my thoughts are definitely not medical advice today i'm going to be talking about my early ms symptoms and ms symptoms in general so if you have any of these symptoms it does not mean that you have ms it just means you have a symptom you might want to write them down and talk with your doctor about them if you have them so let's get started my earliest discernible ms symptoms were weakness and foot drop and those are some pretty big symptoms but i am the queen of denial not the nile denial i i couldn't believe there was something wrong with me there can't be anything wrong with me i'm too healthy i must have slept wrong or it's a pinched nerve or i overdid it so i just completely ignored it for a whole weekend but by the time monday came around i could not ignore it anymore and i went to the doctor and they did not diagnose me with the ms at that time but i will put a card up here uh that you can click on if you want to see my full ms story they were able to clear that up with steroids i didn't have any lingering effects so i decided to get really healthy i that scared me a lot so i started eating more vegetarian more whole foods exercising more doing more stress reduction yoga and and i went happily along for about 11 years and then i started to get some more symptoms and you guessed it i denied it again like there's nothing wrong i'm too healthy there can't be anything wrong with me but these symptoms were a little bit more subtle and a lot of ms symptoms can be subtle it was loss of sensation and some more weakness and there was some fatigue but a lot of these symptoms came and went and sometimes that's what ms symptoms do they flare and they recede and none of them were really debilitating so i just kind of lived with them but then they got worse and i had some tightness some spasticity my leg felt tight and my calf and my thigh and my foot had some loss of sensation and yeah i can't believe i ignored these symptoms but i did and i noticed on my hand was had some numbness as well and i have a numb spot on my cheek as well and all of these are on the opposite side from my initial symptoms um at that point was about 11 years previous and so it was on the other side and it was different it was more subtle so of course i ignored it uh you know some of the signs that i shouldn't have ignored there should have been alarm bells going off because they suspected ms originally but no i was driving one day and i have buttons on my steering wheel so i can adjust the volume and the radio station on my radio and i wanted to turn the volume up and i couldn't i could feel the button but i couldn't distinguish if i had my thumb on the right button i couldn't distinguish the details there was something there but i wasn't sure i was in the right spot so i had to look down and then i could adjust it and i thought that's weird but then i just let it go and then i started to get this tingly sensation in my foot when i exercised and if i really exercised hard if i did a high aerobic class at the gym i noticed that i was getting pain in the bottom of my foot almost like blisters i would come home and i would take my sneaker off and look for blisters and there were never any blisters there so i finally smartened up and went to the doctor and the doctor kind of teased out some more information from me some of these symptoms were temperature related so i have temperature intolerance that's another sign of ms when i get hot my my symptoms get worse my i get that burning sensation on the bottom of my foot the spasticity the tightness in my leg gets worse i get a lot more fatigue if i get overheated for prolonged periods but i also noticed that when i step on something cold like cold tile and i'm not wearing any socks or if i step into the cold ocean i get this spasm and my foot jumps up out of the water or off the tile and once my body acclimates to the cold it settles down so yeah lots of doctors appointments lots of questioning i saw multiple doctors and then i was finally diagnosed and looking back you know there were symptoms way back years and years ago that went hmm i wonder if that was ms i have scoliosis i have curvature of the spine and i wore a back brace for nine years so some of the odd things that happened to me i would put up to oh it must be related to my scoliosis when i sit for too long especially in chairs where my feet don't reach the ground i'm only four foot ten yeah i'm little i'm only four foot ten and my feet don't reach the ground in most chairs and if i have to sit for a long period of time i will sometimes get spasms in my left leg it'll jerk or it will jump sometimes and i always wrote that off to oh it must be related to my scoliosis and maybe not maybe it was related to my ms some of the other symptoms of ms can be optic neuritis the optic nerve can be affected by the lesions and it can get some scarring or it can get some inflammation and this often shows up as a blind spot or blurriness or double vision optic neuritis is very treatable and it's very rare that the blindness is permanent and we can have balance issues because it affects our nervous system sometimes the signals don't get through so it can affect our balance and we can have dizziness and vertigo we can also have bladder and bowel control problems again very treatable and we can have cog fog cog fog is when you can't think of the right word or you have problems concentrating or your mind kind of wanders off cog fog is can be very serious and it can be lead to a lot of people leaving work cog fog and fatigue are two big issues a lot of people think it's be loss of mobility that leads people to leave work and more often than not it is cog fog and fatigue and there's also something called la meets sign and yes you have to say it with a french accent ler meets jean ler meat was a neurologist a french neurologist who discovered this when you put your chin down to your chest and flex the spine you can sometimes get a an electrical or a buzzing sensation down your spine or into your extremities and there's another one called mcardle's sign and that is um from a professor of neurology in london and i can't do a london accent sorry but again when you flex your head down put your chin down and flex your spine there can be a marked increase of weakness and that is because when we pull our chin down and we flex our spine if there's any scars or lesions on our spine it can affect how our body responds when we flex like that another problem that's really big that a lot of people don't talk about is depression up to 50 of people with multiple sclerosis suffer from depression and this can be very serious but it also is very treatable uh living with ms can be a challenge but we can also live really well with our ms through a combination of diet and lifestyle changes and medication we can live well work with your doctors work with your physical therapist work out at the gym and work on your diet and you can live well with ms if you have any questions about ms symptoms or if you'd like to see me do another video on symptoms and maybe go into a little bit more depth on any of the symptoms please leave me a comment below thanks so much for joining me today if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up the like icon and also don't forget to subscribe and ring the notification bell so you don't miss any of my upcoming videos also in the description below you will find a link to be on my mailing list if you would like to do that and i send an email out every time i release a video until next time be well

Channel: Multiple Sclerosis? Even So, It Is Well

Views: 50,612

Keywords: multiple sclerosis, ms symptoms, multiple sclerosis symptoms, Lhermitte’s Sign, McArdle Sign, ms vision, ms eyes, ms pain, ms spasm, ms fatigue, ms tiredness, ms balance, ms dizziness, ms incontinence, ms cog fog, ms signs, my ms story, ms diagnosis, first ms symptoms, signs of ms, optic neuritis, multiple sclerosis attack, mcardle sign, ms what it feels like, ms inflammation, vickie hadge, even so it is well, #EvenSoItIsWell, #VickieHadge #MSSymptoms, MS

Id: d5Vz3XOMymk

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021