April 2007 thru October 2007 were rough months for me. it began – again, very innocently – at a Beerfest (of all places!); in fact i just opened an email from them to Save the Date for 2010. I was walking thru the crowd and i noticed that at times i would feel really high/tipsy and then nothing…hmm, i figured that maybe i was drinking too much beer and just getting tite…hmmm, odd tho, that the feeling would come and go, but hey, beers was flowing; i was happy. Well after that (no drinks involved) i noticed that ever so often during the day, i would get this weird, high feeling that would last about 5-10 secs and then disappear…it just wasn’t making sense. I went to the original neurologist who sent me for another MRI, saw no additional legions on my brain and then told me point blank, it’s not the MS! I went to my PCP who sent me to an opthamologist(?) who sent me somewhere else…I was actually sick of people telling me that they couldn’t find anything wrong…that was also about the time that i was getting sick of being called “Mrs. O’Brien” as well, so i started shopping around for someone else. The thing about finding someone else was that i CERTAINLY wasn’t trying to go thru the original testing again and i hoped that that would not be the case – that’s when i found the MS Center of Atlanta – WOW! who knew such a place existed; i was so excited…
By then the “high” feelings were accompanied by double vision and lack of motor skills. I was speeding/driving (some say i drive like a bat out of hell – i beg to differ) along 285 (4 lane highway in Atlanta) and realized that it wasn’t cool seeing 6 trucks, when in fact there were only 3…i got home and told G that she had to start doing all the driving – the beginning of my “non-hero” days
I went to my new neurologist (who calls me Stacey, btw) and he said to me, well it has to be the MS, what else could it be, there’s nothing else wrong with u…i could have kissed him. THANK U!!!! In retrospect i think that that was all i wanted to hear because at least that explained what was going on. Of course, with me, nothing is ever straightforward…so he explained that it was odd that the “episodes” (as they lovingly were called) happened all day long for about 5-10 secs at a time, but i should monitor, stay on my shot (of course!) and come see him again if things get worse…
i did that…luckily things diddn’t get worse, so i didn’t have to go see him outside of the schedule and then just like that in October/November, they stopped! The disease had declared war and said to me, “yeah u’re the human and i’m the disease, so Take DAT!!!”