What to Look for Multiple Sclerosis Symptoms

What is interesting and at the same time heartbreaking is that multiple sclerosis symptoms take on subtle forms, making the person with MS (multiple sclerosis) appear “normal” and only slightly altered. At the first stages anyway. What I mean to suggest is this: I once was in love with a guy who was in his mid to late thirties. He had MS, but had developed only one of the multiple sclerosis symptoms we read about, witness, or experience ourselves. One day after we had been dating awhile, I was giving him a massage. I noticed that his spine curved in a way that his body looked like it had been two pieces and had been reattached, only the person doing the reconnecting had accidentally shifted the body part including the torso so it rested not even aligned with the hips and legs but sat on the latter a few inches to the left, askew like the crooked man who lived in the crooked house and walked his daily crooked mile. Looking down at my friend made me well up with tears of endearment. This macho, Harley-riding, ex-heroin addict (now don’t get all judgmental here) was really a sorely put together broken little boy.

People who have MS will not expect, typically, that you get all sentimental about their disease. They might, however, tell you that multiple sclerosis symptoms range from the noninvasive to the third degrees of Dante’s hell. The range of symptoms, that is, is so great that comparatively--according to www.mult-sclerosis.org/ mssymptoms.html—there are “few diseases with more potential symptoms than multiple sclerosis.

Some of the many multiple sclerosis symptoms (in lay terms, not the formal names) are listed here, though this list is by no means complete:

Blurred vision, color vision loss, double vision, eye pain, “jerky” eye movement; muscle weakness, muscle tone loss, slurred speech, involuntary muscle contraction, tics, spasms; numbness; paralysis; stiffness; pain; loss of body awareness; loss of ability to move alternatingly or “rhythmically”; urinary and bowel urgency and/or incontinence; blocked ability to reach orgasm; inability to become sexually aroused; short-term memory failure; long-term memory problems; swallowing and respiratory problems; and epileptic seizures.

You may already know about MS and the many and various symptoms that impact the eyes, the CNS (Central Nervous System), he endocrine system, and the motor activities. You may want a more concrete example of a person burdened with this disorder. You may have also watched Paula Abdul go from billboard-topping artist, from singer and dancer, to American Idol judge. You might have noted her occasional slurred speech, for instance. She is not (as far as we know, neither are the others) drunk. Paula has a form, evidently, of MS called Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD), which she incurred in a cheerleading accident when she was seventeen but which did not reveal itself in symptoms until 2004. It is just a heartbreaking, if you ask me, to watch a star “fall”, relegated to judging rather than performing great art. It is only a matter of time, technology, and devoted researchers and scientists that we find relief and maybe even a cure.