She awoke from an afternoon nap, sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. Looking around the room, she knew something was wrong. She rubbed her eyes again. Still wrong. She couldn’t see anything out of her right eye. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, count to 10, you’re just not awake yet. She slowly opened her eyes. Wrong again. She was blind in one eye.
The prognoses from the doctors ranged from mild (eye infection) to scary (brain tumor).
My friend recalled the story to me as it had unfolded for her. The doctors didn’t know what she had. They ran test after test. I had a sinking sensation in my gut as I listened to her; I had my suspicions how this story was going to end.
They sent her in for an MRI.
Oh, no.
I didn’t want to be right, but I was.
She has multiple sclerosis. She was diagnosed in her 30s, a common age for the disease to appear. It shows up like an uninvited and unwanted guest.
I am familiar with the disease because my mom was diagnosed with MS almost 25 years ago. She was 50, the tail end of the predicted age range for MS to present, and hers began with pain in her knee. She says she is fortunate. That is so like her — to claim she is lucky when she has been diagnosed with a debilitating, unpredictable and incurable disease, but there she goes, saying she is lucky that she was 50 instead of 20 when it struck, lucky that it has progressed slowly, lucky that she wears only a leg brace instead of sitting in a wheelchair like so many do.
Chances are, if you live in Colorado, you know someone who has MS. If not, consider yourself lucky — for now. Colorado has in extraordinarily high rate of MS and no one knows why. There are 9,500 Coloradans with the auto-immune disorder.
It is an odd disease. It occurs far more frequently above the 37th parallel, which runs basically along Colorado’s southern border. The high incidences rate continues around the globe between 40 degrees and 60 degrees; Scotland has the highest rate. Close to the equator, and in tropical climates, it all but disappears, but it shows up in the southern hemisphere, again, around the 40th parallel.
It strikes women twice as often as men. It prefers some races to others. It affects everyone differently; there is no road-map for what to expect, but common symptoms include: muscle and motor disturbances, loss of coordination, feelings of pricking or numbness, pain, optical disturbances, incontinence, and depression.
When I sat down to write this column, I planned on explaining what multiple sclerosis is, the strange and awful things it can do to your body, and most importantly, how you can help. But in a cruel twist of irony, my plan has changed. The day after I wrote the story you just read, I got a phone call. A call that seemed determined to jolt me out of any encroaching capitulation. A phone call, from my mom, telling me that my 22-year-old niece, who just graduated from college, who I was a nanny for when she was an infant, who was to begin her job at Microsoft the next day, had just lost the sight in her left eye.
Her doctor said it is most likely an infected optic nerve. I want to believe that. I will believe that until I hear otherwise, but . . . she is female, she is the right age, she lives in Seattle, and if you have a relative with MS, you are up to seven times more likely to be afflicted with it then someone without a family history.
As of this writing, we do not have the results from her MRI. As of this writing, all we can do is pray, hope, cry, worry, not sleep, pound the table with our fists, and wait.
So now I plead with you to help find a cure, to donate, to participate in one of the many fund-raising events, to pledge to donate tissue for research, anything you can do to help conquer this disabling disease.
Katherine Braun (kathi_braun@ ) of Littleton is a stay at home mom who is working on a book about the Deer Creek Middle School shooting in February 2010.
