In the United States women develop MS at approximately twice the rate men do, and no one can explain why women are affected most often from the waist down.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Seventy-five percent of MS sufferers are women.
I think there are a lot of myths about MS, and it may have affected my career.
My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn't - and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught.
My doctor said, for want of a better word, now that we've got medicines out here that can help, let's put you on one of them and say we're treating MS.
MS is not really a degenerative illness. It is not fatal, nor is it always progressive.
I had about four days of like, 'Pity party, woe is me, it's all over.' Then I did some research and spoke with doctors and got in contact with people who have MS, and I soon realized it's actually a lot more manageable than the kind of public perception of it is, and that's part of the reason why I've been so outspoken about it.
I think eventually they're going to find out that MS is like 10 different things. I have a neurological disease something like MS, and it's MS, so let's take medicine for it.
Just learning that you have MS is such a devastating shock.
When I got diagnosed, the more research I did about it - MS overall, as a subject, as a disease - there's a lot of misconceptions and there's a lot of unknowns about it, and there wasn't anyone out that was close to my age or close to anything like me out there.
There were symptoms that I saw, and though I went to many doctors and had many tests, no one diagnosed MS.