Surviving Multiple Sclerosis

As the Guide for Holistic Healing I have the privilege of being put in contact on a regular basis with many people who are on the journey of healing their lives. Betty Iams is a remarkable individual who has extended her personal healing journey into one which includes helping others by sharing her experiences with the public. I was introduced to Betty Iams by Dianne Gholden. Dianne is a regular contributor to our Holistic Healing Forum. Betty has written a book entitled FROM MS TO WELLNESS. I highly recommend IT as an uplifting read to anyone who is facing a health crisis. Hers is a testimony of a belief that physical healing is best approached by taking into account the whole person... mind, spirit & body.

Betty's Story

At 56 years of age, divorced and in a very successful sales and marketing career, I began to develop a weakness in my right leg. In retrospect it was really preceded by an increasing bladder control weakness which I at the time attributed to aging.

After being advised by several assorted health care practitioners that the leg weakness related to an old back injury, I continued my hectic life style. After a year, however, during which I noticed some sense of loss of balance and hyper reflexes on my right side, as well as an increase in my right leg weakness and fatigue, I began a serious search to discover the source of my problem. It became increasingly difficult to continue my state of "denial" when my friends and associates were asking me why I was limping! My excuse of "new shoes" was getting weak. And some days I was just too fatigued to make it through a full day.

It took several neurologists and other medical specialists, numerous MRI's and other neurological tests to finally make a diagnosis of Primary Chronic Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. That was just two months after my 58th birthday. I was told I had almost made the record books. It certainly was a distinction I could have done without! MS usually strikes young adults between 20 and 40 years of age.

I was devastated. My mother had experienced her first MS symptoms when I was in my late teens, and she has been confined to a wheelchair for over 30 years. My mother's MS was the relapsing/remitting kind (almost like a different disease from mine), so her symptoms were not at all similar to mine. I have since learned that no two people have MS exactly the same way. The disease is a degenerative process wherein the myelin sheath surrounding the spinal chord and brain develops lesions or hardened areas called a sclerosis (scar), hence the name multiple sclerosis, or many scars. The individual symptoms vary widely depending on severity and location of the lesions.

Visit Betty at her Web site to continue reading about her healing journey - Betty's House... Life after MS

Article Dateline: June 1998