MS Awareness 2008

Today marks the start of MS Awareness 2008. Not only has an old school friend been diagnosed, & several friends’ relatives, but I have a very, very close family member who has had Multiple Sclerosis for almost ten years now. Through this I have come to realise that awareness & education can be as important as raising money for research and support.

So I always try to support MS in a creative way that provokes interest: one year I made chocolate cakes & sold them by the slice in the Vogue House boardroom to Condé Nast girls in aid of the MS Cake Bake (doubly joyful: feeding cake to Voguettes & raising money/awareness), and I helped the MyShoes for MS campaign celebrity shoe auction by leveraging my address book to solicit shoes from celebs (Andrea Corr gave us her YSL heels which made £2800!) & from the best shoe designers in the world. Divine Mr. Louboutin even signed his pair. (Altho I haven’t ever forgiven the Gina PR for not even bothering to reply to a single email. What goes around comes around, I always say.)

Today I am using my fluffy blog to do a little education so, in return for reading my blog each day, I’d be grateful if you’d bear with me for a couple of paragraphs whilst I inform &, I hope, engage you.

Multiple Sclerosis means multiple scarring and refers to the process where the body’s nerve response conductor to the brain, the myelin sheath around the nerve endings, becomes irredeemably scarred and damaged by the body’s auto-immune response system.

This in turn means that the body’s signals to the brain are slowed down, or rerouted, causing no end of problems & responses, which can be different in every single MS patient, hence the reason why no one person experiences MS in the same way or severity. Symptoms can come & go (relapsing remitting MS), or get worse over time, (progressive MS).

Problems can include neuropathic pain (like awful sunburn and/or tingling permanent pins & needles, bladder infections & loss of bladder control, optic neuritis (pain, loss of or fuzzy vision), loss of sensation (which can mean you can’t walk as you can’t feel your feet), lack of co-ordination, balance & spatial awareness, over-whelming fatigue, cognitive slow down & dissonance (where you can recognise things but not recall their names) and pain. Patients may experience one, some, all or none of these symptoms.

But, just because MS patients often have no visible symptoms, it doesn’t mean they are feeling well. Of course, not every person with MS will experience fatigue, but the majority do and for many it is their single most disabling symptom, battling it on a daily basis

We always use the following analogy to explain the unique nature of MS fatigue, (which is why many people with MS can’t just go down the pub at a moment’s notice, or why they often feel comprehensively exhausted all the time.)

Imagine that any activity has an energy point value. You and I, as healthy people, start each day with an unlimited number of energy points, so we can do whatever we like, when we like.

On a not great day, an MS patient may only have twenty energy points. It takes two points just to get out of bed, one to go to the loo, another one to feed the dog, another to brush your teeth, a couple to make & eat a bowl of cereal and a couple more to get dressed.

That’s nearly half your day’s energy allocation gone and you haven’t actually started your working day yet. If you want to see your friends, go shopping, eat a meal out, you need to conserve your points during the week, so you have enough saved up to get you through the journey & socialising. Even having someone over for a couple of hour’s conversation, let alone staying with you, takes up precious points. That’s why work can be impossible, spontaneity can be a bad idea, and many MS patients give up going out.

Comments like, “Oh I would just work through it”, “Well, I get tired too”, or “I’m ill & tired too: I have a thyroid problem”, show a basic incomprehension of what MS fatigue actually is.

MS fatigue isn’t caused by tiredness, it’s caused by the body fighting to reroute the nervous system, & the best thing a patient can do is to stop and let the body concentrate on fighting through. An MS patient snoozing in bed in the middle of the day isn't being a lazy so and so, or just giving up: they are helping their body by concentrating their physical & mental resources.

If you’d like more information on how MS affects patients, carers, health professionals and relations, then the utterly brilliant MS Trust website relaunched today.