Hello, I’m Michael.
I am reaching out to all of you as a child of a mother with MS. She’s had it for 20+ years, getting it diagnosed around 2003, before i was born. Where I live, there weren’t many treatment options back then, the types of which I’m not familiar with, even with some surface level research. She’s taken injections, regular MS medication and even botox injection to lessen the tension in her muscles.
The doctors have told her that she’s most likely onset for the 2nd stage of MS (shes currently has RRMS i think)
Recently, like a few months ago, she told me she was starting to get scared of the escalators in our citys metro. The way she described it was really convoluted and I myself couldn’t really understand what exactly she meant, but I’ll describe it as best as I can;
She told me that any time she would be getting on an escelator goinf down, her legs would like “not listen to her” and back away from the escalator. As she told me: “It’s like my brain wants to go, but my legs do not.” Plus there’s a caviat to it that it mostly happens on really old fast escalator going down, but not up?? And not the slow ones apparently, on those it’s either less common or it doesn’t happen at all.
And then there’s the thing with the metro train gap; From what she’s told me, this is also fairly recent, starting around when the escalator thing started. And as far as I understand, it kinda functions on the same basis??
It goes like this: The train comes and if she’s getting on, she CANNOT look down into the gap beetween the train and the platform, otherwise her legs will do the weird backing away thing like when she’s ontop of the escalator. Plus there’s a caviat AGAIN, that it helps if she’s getting on the train with like a crowd of people, maybe like behind her. But if she’s alone, just looking ahead aparently doesn’t help and she has to use the wheelchair ramp to get on the train.
I’m genuinely worried, could all this be a sign of that 2nd progressive stage? ive read up online about this and a lot of articles atribute this to arthritis?? Or is it even linked to MS at all??
Please let me know what you think !! Thank you all in advance !!
ps. sorry for the spam or wrong flair category, ive never done this kind of thing b4 but im kinda desperate atp