I am a mommy, a wife, and a worker-bee stumbling through everything Multiple Sclerosis. When I say stumbling through I mean that literally! I make it through with the support of my husband, the joy of my son and the humor to laugh at myself.
• MS is a chronic, unpredictable neurological disease that affects the central nervous system.
• Different people are likely to experience very different symptoms.
• MS is different from muscular dystrophy (MD), which is a group of disorders that cause progressive and irreversible wasting away of muscle tissue. Although MD has some symptoms in common with MS—such as weakness and problems with walking—MD affects the muscles directly while MS affects the central nervous system.
• MS is not contagious and is not directly inherited.
• Most people with MS have a normal or near-normal life expectancy.
• The majority of people with MS do not become severely disabled.
• There are now FDA-approved medications that have been shown to reduce the number of relapses and "modify" or slow down the underlying course of MS.