MS symptoms sneak up on patients, so they're often dismissed. A numb hand? Slept on it funny. Double vision? Must be fatigue. A South Carolina woman shares her moving story of dealing with the highs and lows of multiple sclerosis...
Imagine opening your eyes one morning and seeing double. It happened to Robin Becker two decades ago.
"I saw two husbands, two sets of lights – two of everything," says Becker, 60, a retired educator in Fort Mill, S.C.
At the time, she was certain she had a brain tumor. But it was MS, an unpredictable, often disabling disease of the central nervous system.
When MS strikes, the immune system attacks the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves. It destroys myelin, the protective insulation covering nerve fibers. It's like an electrical wire that's been chewed by a squirrel; if it's cut or damaged, the power is interrupted. MS does the same with the flow of information within the brain, and between it and the body.
MS symptoms impair vision, as Becker found out. They also cause extreme fatigue, balancing and walking difficulties, numbness or pain, tremors and problems with memory for 2.1 million people who live with MS worldwide.
Women are 2 to 3 times more likely to be diagnosed with MS than men. Female hormones, such as estrogen, may play a role in that gender imbalance; the hormone testosterone may protect men from the condition, according to the Society for Women's Health Research. Most patients are diagnosed between ages 20 and 50.
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