What is Multiple Sclerosis?
This short-circuit in MS can cause diverse symptoms that behave in an unpredictable pattern, often causing a series of attacks and remissions. Returning to my earlier lamp cord analogy, consider what happens when you plug the faulty cord into an outlet. The performance of the lamp depends on the amount of damage to the cord. For example, if there's just a tiny superficial tear in the insulation, the lamp may still perform normally for several months. However, as time wears on and the tear in the cord worsens or more damage occurs, the lamp may initially operate, flicker erratically through the day, then return to normal. Even further down the line, when a serious gouge develops that totally exposes the wire; turning on the lamp may cause a complete blowout or shutdown of function (assuming you don't electrocute yourself in the process!).
It is this phenomenon that most clearly illustrates the tendency of MS to attack and then remit. A person with MS may experience a sudden onset of symptoms that mysteriously leave after a week or two. Perhaps it's a bout of double vision or an odd tingling sensation in the legs. Maybe it's a chronic feeling of excessive fatigue, or extreme hypersensitivity to cold. Possibly, it's an unexplained clumsiness or an inability to maintain your balance on skates even though you've been a champion ice princess since your Sesame Street days.
These series of attacks and remissions make a diagnosis of MS difficult to pin down. Often, early in the disease, a person experiences one or more of these puzzling symptoms but doesn't bring it to the attention of a physician because it simply goes away on its own. Because the disturbances may last just a week or two--or sometimes a day or two--many early symptoms are dismissed as signs of stress, or depression, or just a passing curiosity. But make no mistake, just because the disease is "flickering" doesn't mean that the insulation is intact or that the problem is gone. As more myelin damage occurs, the symptoms will become more pronounced and will recur more often.
So what does this mean for the person with a nervous system gone haywire? The good news is that while a cure for MS is not currently available, there are many promising treatments and drugs designed to alleviate symptoms and slow disease progression. Of course, there are the occasional horror stories of total paralysis
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