When I left off last night, I had moved to Sweden and gone off my MS medication.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Nearly a year after I moved, I got pregnant.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
A few weeks after Tage was born, I had a pretty severe flare-up that may well have been the worst I’ve had.\u00a0 Both of my legs and one of my arms were affected.\u00a0 I couldn’t change diapers or braid Lydia’s hair, and to go downstairs I had to sit on my butt and scoot.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I took prednisone again then, and was back to normal in fairly short order.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Around the same time, I also made a connection between my MS flare-ups and aspartame.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I broke that habit when I moved to Sweden, because Swedish Diet Coke is downright awful compared to its American counterpart.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I was hoping it would help me drink more water, so I was drinking one to two liters daily.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I started out taking 1000 mg per day, and literally from the very first dose I could feel a difference.\u00a0 It’s hard to describe, but the new feeling was absolutely an improvement, and within a week I was absolutely a believer.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Since I started taking omega-3 more than five years ago, I haven’t had a single significant flare-up.\u00a0 Not one.\u00a0 Not even in the potentially volatile post-partum periods after Petra and Brynja were born, and not at any other time.\u00a0 At most, I’ve had a bit of weakness in an arm or a leg, and that only very occasionally.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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?\u00a0 A nice surprise!)<\/em>, and this past Monday I had an appointment with my neurologist to discuss the results.\u00a0 I was thrilled (though not terribly surprised, I admit) to be told that there was no current or recent MS activity in my brain.\u00a0 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!<\/p>\n While all of this sounds very good, I do want to be realistic.\u00a0 Omega-3 has been a godsend for me, but it hasn’t cured me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I also tire more easily than I’d like, and I sometimes struggle with fatigue.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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;\u00a0 if that turns out to be true for me, I will indeed be among the most fortunate).<\/p>\n And with that, I guess I haven’t got much more to say.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I left off last night, I had moved to Sweden and gone off my MS medication.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is often the case… Read More The calm after the storm …<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}