Monday, April 23, 2012

Multiple Sclerosis: A Creative Disease Calls For Creative Treatment

Ah, multiple sclerosis. Chances are, you know someone who has it. Chances are, you've never heard of it. So on both sides, I'll explain.

M.S. is a pretty common disease. Those of you who know me or have read my "It Sounds Like We Would've Had a Great Deal to Say to Each Other" (in other words, "About Me") paragraph, you know my dad has this super creative disease. I'll get to that after I explain what it is.

This "creative" disease affects the spinal cord and nerves. It affects your organs... a lot of things are affected, from your legs to your brain.

What's so creative? You can have it and be completely fine, in many cases. In my dad's case, you can have it and have intense pain and muscle weakness. In severe cases, you can even lose the use of your legs, like my grandfather.

Another creative aspect: it is, evidently, recessive. You can only end up with it if it runs in BOTH sides of your family. Pretty cool, eh? Not if you're like me, and this actually IS the case for you. Let me include a not-pedigree-pedigree:

P.GRANDMOTHER / GRANDFATHER          M. GRANDMOTHER / GRANDFATHER

STEVE (P. UNCLE) / DWAYNE (FATHER)   
                                                                          DENICE, KAREN, BILL (M. AUNTS/UNCLE), JEANETTE (MOTHER)

TAMEISHA / SHAWN / TIFFANY/ TIERRA / TAMARA / DOUG / CHARITY / FAITH / HOPE

                                                     BRIAN / BRAYLON

What I noticed was, on both sides of the family, somehow both of my parents carry the recessive allele of MS. The purple highlighted names are the MS patients. And on my dad's side, I don't know about you, but I see a pattern--- both of my grandparents had/have the disease, but only one child ended up with it. Same on my mom's side, but... none of my maternal grandparents had the disease, yet STILL one child in her generation ended up with it.

So what does this all mean? If this keeps going on, one child in my generation (and no, I do not have that many siblings... up until Charity, they are all cousins and after me, those are second cousins) will have been diagnosed with the disease by the time they've reached their 30s.

So what do we do? We pray, we hope, we fight. This is a creative disease that needs a creative cure NOW. Seizures and strokes are happening among the MS community, and health is slowly falling... join me and blog until the whole world knows what this disease can do!

I'd love to hear from you... if you have any experiences with the disease, PLEASE blog about it... we may not know how to create a cure, but we DO know how this affects US, and we DO know how to make our voices be heard.

BE SILENT NO LONGER!!!!

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