Isabelle, Alexandra and Ana are three of the Romanian women diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. For them, everything started at 23 years old. Life was completely different after they had their first kitten, and the road from the first symptoms to the diagnosis was full of challenges and left trauma.
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“I remember I was 23 years old, I was at the gym, when I started to feel sick, I got dizzy and my vision started to disappear. At the ophthalmology hospital they gave me cortisone pills and said that from their point of view I was fine and to take the pills, that I would recover. After a year, my tongue started to go numb and, little by little, my whole body on the left side.”
“At the age of 23 I experienced the morning that radically changed the course of my life. Physically, I know what I felt: I couldn’t speak – I had dysarthria – and the left side of my body didn’t help me move – I had hemiparesis. What the psychic told me, I really don’t know anymore, he was confused by the anxiety caused by the insecurity of the doctors who were consulting me”.
“I had my first pus, meaning numbness in my legs from the knees down, when I was 23 and a half, in the summer of 1998. I had my second pus at 24 and a half, four months after my first pregnancy, when various areas of my body were affected one by one”.
In the order of their memories, the three women are named: Isabelle Ioana Mirila (28 years old), Alexandra Cotroceanu (30 years old) and Ana Maria Drăgănică (44 years old).
Multiple sclerosis in Romania: many patients, few treated
Officially, there are over 4,500 Romanians who live with multiple sclerosis and accessed the free treatment program in 2018. The real number of those who have this “disease of the young adult”, as it is also known, is however higher. Some of them do not get treatment because they do not recognize the disease. Sometimes because of social stigma. Other times, they don’t even recognize it to themselves. Treated, the disease can let you live a relatively normal life. Left untreated, it wreaks havoc and can lead to severe disability.
You usually don’t know anything about a disease until you come into contact with it in one way or another. As ironic as it may sound, the happiest case is when you hear that someone else got sick, not you. That’s how we heard about chronic kidney failure, and that’s how we heard about multiple sclerosis or multiple sclerosis. Fortunately, it’s not me. Unfortunately, it’s always someone known. Often, someone young.
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