My Multiple Sclerosis Story: Symptoms and Diagnosis

so i was diagnosed two years ago but the journey can be said to have started a long time before that it all began about five years ago with uh some sort of a tingling feeling on one side of the face i went to the doctor he made me smile he made me pull out my tongue and he said like you're fine all right fair enough then i had some vision problems i had at some point a stain in my vision in 2011 that is four years ago i was trying to live very healthy so i went for a run every morning i would run for about half an hour until one day without any warning or escalation or anything i couldn't run more than 100 meters after which my foot would start sagging which is what i found out later was called a foot drop and then after that again i had a problem uh swallowing the food for about a month and that was one year before getting the definitive attack that got me diagnosed so this attack started actually it was an attack that kind of escalated it started with double vision and it was a very stressful moment in my life and i figured that it was just because of the stress then other symptoms started piling up on top of that first started that i couldn't work properly i couldn't coordinate my movements on the right side of my body i could feel that even just typing on the computer and then came the speech problems i remember distinctly as i was trying to hide all these uh symptoms that i was going through from other people which i could because who could see that i was seeing double i remember trying to say a word to a friend and i simply couldn't pronounce it correctly that is when the vanity i think and the embarrassment became too much so i called the doctor the doctor sent me immediately to the hospital where i got all sorts of tests the classic ms tests still she couldn't figure out what it was the doctor so i was kept there for two nights until one day when she was there repeating those same tests again came the head doctor i think a very very handsome man i remember he took over and without saying anything to me he just said to her well shall we stick him in the back hmm remember the feeling of terror i got when i heard that so they did which was a horrible experience i hear all sorts of different stories about spinal taps and some good some in different and some directly terrible well mine was one of the terrible ones i'm not going to describe it though because i don't want to terrify anyone who hasn't had a spinal tap before and after the spinal tap i also got an mri of course then came the doctors finally to announce something it was another doctor this time and she came and she looked at me with a very concerned look and said are you able to lead a normal life why yes i am are you successful in your studies well i would say so yes and she became very serious and then it turns out that i had more than 20 lesions in my brain and my spine which might explain that concern but no i was perfectly functional and then came another doctor and announced that the definite diagnosis was multiple sclerosis then the following days after being put on cortisone came the more detailed term relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis because thankfully the cortisone was able to make the symptoms remit after this i was put on avon x which was a horrible experience uh i simply could not handle it every day that i would inject it into myself i was aware that i was condemning myself to two days of flu and so on for six months until i got another attack it was a very mild attack of optic neuritis my one one eye hurt when i moved it this the doctors obviously could not tolerate so the next medication ended up being tysabri the monthly infusion during the transition from the avon x to the tizabri uh they say it takes about three months for the tizabri to reach its full effect so during the first month i had another attack this was an attack on the left side of my face that started getting number and number started with numbness in the eyelid very weird feeling that i thought i couldn't identify as anything serious then slowly started spreading to the cheek and to around the mouth and then to the whole arm and little by little i also noticed that it started affecting my speech so that's when i went for that cortisone treatment which made it improve definitely this was last year that i had my last attack and ever since i've been attack free and the tizabri has been working its magic apparently some of my symptoms such as spasms have improved but that's it for tysabri because i have done the full year and i am jc positive so it's too dangerous for me to carry on with the thai zabri so i will now be put on gillenya [Music] what lingering symptoms do i have well i have very few but i do have the leg spasms when i walk down the stairs another lingering symptom is the balance which is pretty poor pretty poor i always have to look down at my feet to make sure that i don't fall and another one which is mostly annoying although very annoying is the itchiness i get itchy pretty much all over but i especially get itchy here so it makes it very um i think distracting for other people to have a conversation with me because i'm always scratching somewhere but that's about it when i get tired obviously the double vision comes back and my balance gets a lot worse and i pretty much look like i'm drunk so that's it for my ms story thank you for listening you

Channel: Life of Seb

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Keywords: multiple sclerosis, living with ms, ms diagnosis, ms treatment, multiple sclerosis treatment, multiple sclerosis story, ms symptoms, multiple sclerosis diagnosis, autoimmune disease, neurological disease, chronic disease, medical, brain disease, ms story, neurology, walking problems, speech problems, spinal tap, mri, numbness, tingling, life of seb, my ms story, selma blair, people with ms, life with ms, i have ms, ms patient, multiple sclerosis symptoms

Id: NTFt49VErbM

Length: 7min 16sec (436 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2015