Inside My Mind

My Mom

  My mom was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis in 2006. I was only 6 years old and it felt like our world was collapsing beneath our feet. Multiple sclerosis is a nervous disease where the white blood cells in your body attack your nervous system. Most people end up paralyzed from the waist down usually about seven years after being diagnosed. Due to an increasing amount of pain and numbness she had to leave her job. Over the next two years her MS got worse. She heard about a few doctors in Texas that helped a lot of people manage their MS and wanted to be able to see them and get help. So we packed up and moved across the country. I was only eight at this time so it wasn't that hard for me to leave everything I knew. I saw it as a new adventure. It was hard on my parents though. Our close relationship with my moms side of the family suffered. We no longer have a very good relationship with her family anymore. Anyways when we moved to Texas we had a place already lined up for us to stay and my dad had already found a job. Even though it was the main reason for moving all the way from Michigan to Texas, my mom was able to see very few of the doctors she originally wanted to see. All the doctors she saw would put her on medication after medication to help manage the symptoms. After a couple of years of this she developed an allergic reaction to 90% of those medications, so she stopped taking any medication at all. While I was in high school I worked on several projects studying MS and how is cause and how to help cure it. It wasn't until the end of my junior year that my mom and I found cases of people curing themselves by changing their diet. She found a few different doctors that helped guide her along the rough path that was ahead of her and our family. We have to change almost everything in our day to day lives. Even when I am writing this in 2018 we still are not completely where we need to be, but we are working hard to get there. It has now been 10 years since she has been diagnosed and she still has almost complete control over her body. She does currently suffer from severe numbness amongst other thing. Not only is she battling to reverse the damage that MS has done on her body but she is also working to prevent any future health issues such as this in myself and my siblings. She is also working to rid herself of other autoimmune diseases. Everyday is a struggle for her, but she doesn't let it show. She hides is and is often accused of faking her illness just because it isn't obvious about it. She isn't the type of person to complain about her pain to gain others pity. Instead she would rather suffer in silence. My mother is a strong individual and has worked and is still working so hard to overcome her own struggles on top of that of her family. My mother is the person who has most shaped me into who I am today.