I guess my whole story starts sometime earlier this year. The very first things I noticed were that I could sleep for 12 hours and still feel exhausted, and that I was forgetting where I put things and having serious problems with short term memory. I chalked it up to the fact that I am ADD and a bit of a stoner, talked briefly about going back to a psychiatrist and being prescribed Adderall, then forgot about it.
April 2, 2011-- I'm at work like I normally am on a Sunday. I'm an apprentice hairstylist and Sundays are my favorite day because I get to take walk-ins. I'm nearing the end of my day, when I start to notice that my feet feel like they're asleep. Unlike many of my coworkers, I don't wear Gaga heels, I wear super breathable, super comfy canvas sneakers. I'm the color room jogging in place for a few minutes, waiting for that tingly pins and needles sensation that comes with the rush of blood back to a numb extremity. I' m afraid that my smoking and bad eating have caught up with me and I am having some sort of blood vessel constriction. I go home and obsessively massage my feet, try to relax, and decide to wait it out till the morning.
April 3, 2001: I wake up at 7am exactly, like I do every morning (this is apparently common in MS patients, I never did this until recent years). This time, I don't go back to bed, because it feels like someone shot me up with Novocaine from the waist down. I panic. I get out of bed and breathe a small sigh of relief when I discover that I don't seem to have any problems walking. I wonder if my delightfully squishy memory foam mattress has set my back out of alignment and I've pinched some important nerve. I open up the computer to Google. Every doctor I've ever had has told me to avoid self-diagnosing on WebMD, and while I don't need to get myself any more worked up, I need something to explain what's causing my body to go numb. The very first answer to pop up is MS. I write it off, after all I am 22, and I have no family history of MS. The only people I've encountered with MS that I was aware of were physically disabled and at times horribly depressing, and I'm neither. My search, however, is popping up with other scary things too-- nasty viruses, stroke, Lyme disease, etc. I drink too many energy drinks to ever have a vitamin B12 deficiency, and at this point I am begging fate to do me a solid and let it be a small injury, I'd even take a thyroid problem.
By now it's 11am. My boyfriend wakes up and finds me in the shower, panicking, scrubbing furiously at my skin to try and awaken any sort of sensation. My efforts have done nothing except make my skin ridiculously pink. At this point I'm so confused and terrified that all I can do is ball up in the fetal position and sob, probably scaring the hell out of my boyfriend because up until that point I don't think I'd cried a tear in front of him. He calms me down, and tells me I need to call my doctor. I agree, and the story continues.
April 2, 2011-- I'm at work like I normally am on a Sunday. I'm an apprentice hairstylist and Sundays are my favorite day because I get to take walk-ins. I'm nearing the end of my day, when I start to notice that my feet feel like they're asleep. Unlike many of my coworkers, I don't wear Gaga heels, I wear super breathable, super comfy canvas sneakers. I'm the color room jogging in place for a few minutes, waiting for that tingly pins and needles sensation that comes with the rush of blood back to a numb extremity. I' m afraid that my smoking and bad eating have caught up with me and I am having some sort of blood vessel constriction. I go home and obsessively massage my feet, try to relax, and decide to wait it out till the morning.
April 3, 2001: I wake up at 7am exactly, like I do every morning (this is apparently common in MS patients, I never did this until recent years). This time, I don't go back to bed, because it feels like someone shot me up with Novocaine from the waist down. I panic. I get out of bed and breathe a small sigh of relief when I discover that I don't seem to have any problems walking. I wonder if my delightfully squishy memory foam mattress has set my back out of alignment and I've pinched some important nerve. I open up the computer to Google. Every doctor I've ever had has told me to avoid self-diagnosing on WebMD, and while I don't need to get myself any more worked up, I need something to explain what's causing my body to go numb. The very first answer to pop up is MS. I write it off, after all I am 22, and I have no family history of MS. The only people I've encountered with MS that I was aware of were physically disabled and at times horribly depressing, and I'm neither. My search, however, is popping up with other scary things too-- nasty viruses, stroke, Lyme disease, etc. I drink too many energy drinks to ever have a vitamin B12 deficiency, and at this point I am begging fate to do me a solid and let it be a small injury, I'd even take a thyroid problem.
By now it's 11am. My boyfriend wakes up and finds me in the shower, panicking, scrubbing furiously at my skin to try and awaken any sort of sensation. My efforts have done nothing except make my skin ridiculously pink. At this point I'm so confused and terrified that all I can do is ball up in the fetal position and sob, probably scaring the hell out of my boyfriend because up until that point I don't think I'd cried a tear in front of him. He calms me down, and tells me I need to call my doctor. I agree, and the story continues.
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