Today I vividly remember my first MS attack, although at the time I didn’t think much about it. It seemed pretty subtle. It was a little over ten years ago, and I was living outside of the Philadelphia area, in my mid-twenties, and trying to figure out what 
sort of career I wanted. Being an English major can be a blessing and a curse because it keeps your options open, but it doesn’t give you very specific career skills, unless you become a journalist or some other type of writer. So at the moment I was investigating health/human service ideas, because I enjoy helping people.
I was living in a studio apartment and I remember waking up one morning and feeling like I had slept funny on my lower back. One small area on my left side was tingling with pins and needles like it was still asleep. About the size of my palm. Except this area didn’t “wake up” and it continued to feel like this for about a week.
Now I didn’t have good health insurance at the time, and about a year earlier I had contracted Lyme disease because I was working outdoors in a region that has a population of deer ticks only second to that of Lyme, Connecticut (where Lyme disease is thought to have begun.) I had been quickly treated with a strong course of antibiotics, and I believed I had made a full recovery. But in the back of my mind, when this pins and needles event happened in my lower back, I began to tell myself that it could have been a minor side-effect from having had Lyme disease, because this infection can cause tingling and numbness as well. So I chalked the whole tingling episode up as a small inconvenience. Plus the whole thing went away within a week like it never even happened. No harm.
At this point I knew absolutely nothing about multiple sclerosis.
