Beka’s Canna-Story Part One of a Three Part Series
Diagnosis
Imagine being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at the age of 14. Beka, now 35 and married with a fur-baby named Ryder, was in her 8th grade art class in 2001 when she started experiencing double-vision and was having trouble holding her pencil. Uncertain of what was happening, she asked to be excused to go to the bathroom and was having trouble walking so she had to cling to the wall to hold herself up. Unable to shake what was a going on she went to the school nurse and her family immediately took her to the hospital. After a barrage of tests and a brain scan that showed numerous lesions, she and her family were told she had brain tumors and was going to die.
Her family wasn’t willing to accept that diagnosis and took her to another hospital where more doctors ran more tests and after 5 days Beka was finally diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Her brain scans showed over 20 lesions at age 14.
Life for Beka and her family changed in an instant! They were faced with the reality that their little girl was going to need on-going care, so her mom changed professions to dedicate more time to her daughter. As they looked back at different incidents when Beka was younger, they realized there were symptoms some number of years prior to her actual diagnosis. It is very rare for someone so young to be diagnosed with this disease. So rare, that a case study was published in 2001 about her Ring-Enhancing Lesions in Child (Journal of Child Neurology, Volume 17, Number 1, January 2002).
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a disease that impacts the brain and spinal cord which make up the central nervous system and controls everything we do. The exact cause of MS is unknown, but we do know that something triggers the immune system to attack the brain and spinal cord. The resulting damage to myelin, the protective layer insulating wire-like nerve fibers, disrupts signals to and from the brain. This interruption of communication signals causes unpredictable symptoms such as numbness, tingling, mood changes, memory problems, pain, fatigue, blindness and/or paralysis. (nationalmssociety.org)
At age 14, Beka’s life-long journey with this disease had just begun. Read more about her Canna-Story in next month’s newsletter.
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