When I left off last night, I had moved to Sweden and gone off my MS medication.  Though I was still having a couple of flare-ups per year, in the main I was feeling better than I had done in years.

Nearly a year after I moved, I got pregnant.  It is often the case that pregnancy will settle down autoimmune diseases, but I continued to have some symptoms, including one attack that affected my walking, and a strange little episode of facial numbness, intense headache, and difficulty speaking.  For the first I wrangled a prescription for prednisone from a specialist obstetrician, and for the second I took a midnight trip to the ER, where they checked out the baby and talked me down from the little panic I found myself in, and all was well.

A few weeks after Tage was born, I had a pretty severe flare-up that may well have been the worst I’ve had.  Both of my legs and one of my arms were affected.  I couldn’t change diapers or braid Lydia’s hair, and to go downstairs I had to sit on my butt and scoot.  My legs were so bad, in fact, that I had to take a plastic lawn chair into the shower with me because I couldn’t stand up longer than a couple of minutes.  I took prednisone again then, and was back to normal in fairly short order.

For the next year or so, the course of my disease went more or less the way it’d done since my move to Sweden — not too good, not too bad, but, overall, light-years better than the first couple of years after diagnosis.  I still wasn’t taking any medication beyond the occasional steroid taper, as it wasn’t compatible with pregnancy or breastfeeding, and I was feeling increasingly less inclined to start up again.

Around the same time, I also made a connection between my MS flare-ups and aspartame.  The last year I lived in the States, when I’d had a particularly hard time with MS, I’d been drinking at least two cans of Diet Coke every day.  I broke that habit when I moved to Sweden, because Swedish Diet Coke is downright awful compared to its American counterpart.  I hadn’t consumed much aspartame at all for a couple of years until I started drinking Fun Light, a sort of Crystal Light-type sugar-free drink.  I was hoping it would help me drink more water, so I was drinking one to two liters daily.  In the space of just a few days I could feel myself going into a flare-up, and remembering that I’d read about “aspartame poisoning” more than once, I stopped immediately with the Fun Light.  I felt better surprisingly quickly, and I ended up not having a flare-up, the first time that I’d successfully stopped one before it started.  Thinking back on just how much Diet Coke I’d been drinking when things were so bad, I put two and two together and sent aspartame straight to the top of my “do not consume” list.

Figuring out the aspartame connection was big for me, of course, but in the fall of 2003, I made a discovery that would truly prove to be a watershed in my life with MS.

Somewhere–I can’t remember where or at the suggestion of whom–I read that omega-3 fatty acids could help promote increased brain and neurological function.  I did a little more checking and determined that while omega-3 might not help with MS, at the very least it wouldn’t hurt, so I went out and bought a bottle of capsules.  I started out taking 1000 mg per day, and literally from the very first dose I could feel a difference.  It’s hard to describe, but the new feeling was absolutely an improvement, and within a week I was absolutely a believer.  I was honestly amazed by how much better I felt when taking it, and on days when I missed a dose, it took only a couple of hours before I started to feel “off,” a feeling that sent me directly to the medicine cabinet.

Since I started taking omega-3 more than five years ago, I haven’t had a single significant flare-up.  Not one.  Not even in the potentially volatile post-partum periods after Petra and Brynja were born, and not at any other time.  At most, I’ve had a bit of weakness in an arm or a leg, and that only very occasionally.  I did ultimately round out my supplement course with a B-complex, a multi-vitamin, and recently, a calcium/vitamin-D tablet, but otherwise I’m not pursuing any MS treatment.

A couple of weeks ago, I had my first MRI since I was diagnosed nearly eleven years ago (Sarah F. – did Eva tell you I saw her there?  A nice surprise!), and this past Monday I had an appointment with my neurologist to discuss the results.  I was thrilled (though not terribly surprised, I admit) to be told that there was no current or recent MS activity in my brain.  The result was so good that Olof said he had the impression that the doctor was a little disappointed that there wasn’t more to talk about!

While all of this sounds very good, I do want to be realistic.  Omega-3 has been a godsend for me, but it hasn’t cured me.  I may not be having flare-ups, but I do have some permanent disability in my left leg, and I do have a lot of sensory symptoms, ranging from mildly annoying to acutely painful.  I also tire more easily than I’d like, and I sometimes struggle with fatigue.  And though I don’t dwell it, in the back of my mind I’m aware that I’m living with a condition that is predictable only in its unpredictability.  There’s no telling what shape I’ll be in ten years from now, so I try to remember to be grateful for every day that I feel as good as I’ve felt for the past several years (though I do take immeasurable comfort from the fact that the best indicator of future disease progression appears to be past disease progression;  if that turns out to be true for me, I will indeed be among the most fortunate).

And with that, I guess I haven’t got much more to say.  🙂