A New Diagnosis

There's a lot of searching for answers when you first get diagnosed with anything permanent.  Maybe knowing what happened to lead up to my diagnoses will help someone else feel less alone.  I could have used that info from anyone when I was first going through this.

MS came on very suddenly for me.  There was no doubt in my mind that something was very wrong.  I just didn't know what.  One day a couple of hours after I woke up, I got this numb/tingling sensation head to toe, all at once.  You know that feeling your foot gets when it falls asleep?  My whole body felt like that.  I already knew the sensation was called neuropathy since I had experienced it on a much smaller scale (in two fingers) due to a neck injury.  My first thought was, "I must have exacerbated my old neck injury." My neck didn't really hurt but I was numb.  So I went to the quick care.

The doctor at the quick care was too nervous to even examine me.  He told me to go to the ER and get checked out for a stroke.  I didn't listen.  I'm not advising anyone else to ignore medical advice, ever.  I just had enough information on hand to strongly believe that I was not suffering from a stroke.  Instead, I made the earliest appointment I could get with my primary care doctor and started doing my own research.  While researching I learned about some of the effects untreated thyroid disease can have on your body.  I have hypothyroidism and at the time I wasn't taking my synthroid because I couldn't afford the blood work.  Knowing that I had chosen to skip that expense for almost a year, I became convinced that I had done this to myself.

At my appointment, I explained what I had learned during my research to my doctor.  She agreed that my theory was one possibility, but there were a few others that could be as worrisome, including the possibility that I had somehow worsened my neck injury after all of these years.  Not all spinal injuries present with pain so she wanted to cover all of the bases.  She did extensive blood work, which she shared with the in-house internal medicine specialist (IMS) and ordered an MRI of my neck and brain.  The MRI was clear, there were lesions.  She called me back for a follow-up with the IMS. Dr. Grimberg (my new IMS) let me know the most likely diagnosis and offered to take over as my primary care physician.

Before beginning treatment we had to rule out any other autoimmune diseases that can sometimes look like MS, such as  Neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD). She ordered more blood work including an NMO IgG antibody test.  Fortunately, all the tests came back negative for serious anomalies. Within one week of the onset of symptoms, I had a confirmed diagnosis, MS.  

I am actually grateful for the outcome, as hard as it was to process.  Of all the things likely to cause these symptoms, MS is one of the most benign.  It only changes my life, it doesn't end it.  Now I just have to learn how to live a little differently.  I can handle that.