Apr
21
Michelle Floyd woke up one morning about four years ago, her body numb from neck to feet.
The sensation — if being numb is a sensation — went away in slices, like lights were turned off sequentially from one end of a long room to the other.
Multiple sclerosis often strikes people in the prime of their lives; it hit Floyd, now 29, when she thought she was in perfect health.
The autoimmune disease, in which neurons in the brain and spinal cord lose the fatty covering that allows them to effectively conduct the electricity of nerve impulses, happens commonly in women in their 30s. It may eventually leave them in wheelchairs, their minds clouded and their muscles uncontrolled.
Or it may not. One of the hallmarks of multiple sclerosis is its unpredictability — perhaps the disease’s only real consistency is that it is inconsistent. Some patients are unsteady, while others are blinded. Some have numbness, slurred speech. Many have weakness.
“It’s exactly the lack of repetitiveness of it from patient to patient that gives you the clue to the diagnosis,” said Dr. Gabriel Pardo, medical director of the MS Center of Oklahoma at Mercy NeuroScience Institute and the state’s only physician who specializes in the disease. He called the disease “fascinating.”
read more: Multiple sclerosis eludes doctors | NewsOK.com
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