Somebody said to me ages ago that I should document my life so I thought I would try doing a Blog. Not too sure what I am going to write yet so bear with me for now.
I am 43 years old, very happily married and I have MS.
The first symptoms of my MS appeared in December 1995. At first I thought I had been spending too much time watching telly or playing on my SNES!
I started getting an ache and a bit of blurry vision in my left eye. As a typical man would I chose to ignore it at first, but after it started getting worse after a few days I decided I had better get it checked. So off I went to the GP and after telling him the problem and a quick check off my eye he decided it was probably a virus. I was told if it had not improved in 4 or 5 days I would be best going to the A&E department to get it checked out.
The pain and blurriness gradually got worse the next few days so I took myself to the hospital. I was referred to an eye specialist by the A&E department and then started loads of prodding and pocking and numerous tests! I think they must have given me something for the pain as I don’t recall it getting too bad.
The blurriness was another matter, it steadily got worse so in the end my vision was totally black in my left eye. It was Christmas time by then and we were due to travel from Ipswich to Hull to spend it with my family. I knew I shouldn’t really be driving but decided to do the journey anyway.
The night we decided to travel to Hull just happened to be a night with thick fog and freezing temperatures. I remember being a bit apprehensive at driving in the fog with the use of only 1 eye but we did the trip anyway. I can’t remember how long we stayed in Hull but I remember that when we got back to Ipswich I had more tests and spent a few days in hospital while they gave me steroid treatment to try to speed up the healing process in my eye.
After several more tests including a lumbar puncture which was very painful, I was told by the neurologist I has been seeing that I had Relapsing Remitting MS. Obviously it was a shock to myself and Hales and we had quite a scary time reading about MS as all the information and leaflets we had seemed to show people wheelchair bound and not doing very good.
We did more research on the condition and realised it was not all doom and gloom and it would probably be a few years before I got too bad. In the meantime I had had another relapse which affected my legs quite badly so the neurologist decided to put me on a drug trial that would hopefully limit the number of relapses I had.
Well that’s quite a bit to take in for my first blog so I will stop here for now and continue with the story sometime soon
Rob
My Life and My MS 