when I was 14/18

I used to periodically experience electric shock like sensations in my hands - especially my thumbs it would feel as if the thumb bones were broken.

Recall when I was about 18 experiencing periodic urgency - desperate need to go to the toilet but when I got there only a few drops.

By the end of schooldays I had slipped from being top or next to top of the class to being in the bottom quarter - not due to lack of studying.

Have I been ‘incubating’ m.s. for many years before dx aged 30?

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ok this is an interesting post. In late seventies early eighties I would wake up every morning with a left dead arm. I mean dead. I went to see my GP worried. It was weird like an arm you get when you slept funny on it but always there in the morning and it would wake up but leave me fingers tingling for a bit. He said it was my smoking five cigs a day that was causing it. I then got really bad pain in my right side leg could barely walk i was told it was siactica. it was really hard to walk. I was going to kenya too and that was a chore.

then they both just went like they had never been there. I did ask my nuero could it have been MS way back then he said i doubt it you would be much more disabled if it was. but then i met a lady when hers started in late seventies, and she was still mobile.

anyway i dont know but i can think back when i was a child not being able to stand at top of stairs as i would get vertigo.

its an interestiing question.

I’d say yes. I don’t think doctors know as much about MS as they claim, and I think the fact that so many of us spend years trying to get diagnoses is proof of this. I had issues like both of you have described back in my teens, and my “bad spells” have followed a set time pattern ever since. All of my tests in past years came back negative, but I also couldn’t get the tests until months after the symptoms passed. This year, I finally had a doctor who ran tests immediately, and voila! They finally confirmed I have MS.

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what a relief for you NorasMom, its such a long lonely road isnt it just waiting, and waiting. but i do often wonder if we are predestined to have it.

I understand that, with the creation of DMT’s in recent years, they need to be careful who they diagnosis and assign to the heavy-duty drugs, but I also think that the doctors should start looking at the bigger picture for each of us. If they have a patient who is coming to them year after year with similar complaints then they should consider those issues as part of a whole, rather than being required to adhere to the McDonald criteria.

I don’t think that we’re necessarily predestined for this, but I do think that many of us are ignored for too long because we don’t show a very narrow grouping of physical results on a couple tests. How can they say that MS mimics so many other diseases and then turn around and tell us that our many symptoms aren’t MS? It seems to me that if you have a bunch of MS sufferers dealing with the same problems, then those things really ARE part of MS, and they need to be recognized as such.