Bad news first, it has been confirmed by a second (and actually third and a 4th year OHSU student) that I have ms. The good news is that I didn’t purchase this domain www.runwithms.com in vain. I’ll run with the good news. Plus I would have felt awfully silly saying to you all that “oh BTW, I don’t have ms afterall.” So life goes back to normal (well normal as of late) and I can stand up and yell “Huzzah! I have ms!”

I almost didn’t make it to OHSU for my appt. The paperwork they ahd sent me said to be there 30 minutes early and if I were 10 minutes late, they might reschedule me. Well it had taken me 3 months to get this appt, so I wanted to make sure I arrived on time. I checked our transit systems trip track (a great online utility that you plug in a start and finish location as well as a time you leave or arrive and it returns the exact (well mostly) busses you need to use to get there.) I discovered it would only take about 35 minutes to get there, no need to have Ruthann drive me after all. I had one connection to make and I’d be there.

So first off the bus was packed and therefor slow. Then I accidentally got off a stop early. The road at my connection is pretty crazy and busy, so to discourage people from cossing the busy streets they have tunnels under the roads (which by the way are one of the least desirable places I have ever been, gross!) So I take the tunnel and come out in completely the wrong area. I keep walking and see my stop, but darn it, it is going in the wrong direction. I ‘m looking around and I see no other 66 stop and noone around me has any idea where I should go including a bus driver. So I cross a couple of streets and low and behold, there is my stop. So I sit down to wait for it, luckly I had my Murakami book to keep me company. I read and read and read and no bus. There is a schedule on the wall of the bus shelter, so I check it out an dfind out that the last 66 runs at 8:04 in the morning, apparently the bus I was to connect with that I missed. Arrg!

So another bus comes and I ask him if there is another way to get to OHSU. He says yes, get on my bus and get off at the next stop, then walk 3 blocks up to Broadway and catch the 8. So I do that, wait at the stop and get on the next 8. The clinic supplied me with a map whcih I think is designed to confuse. I get totally lost in my head and have to ask the driver wher I get off, I tell him I need to be near the tram (an actual tram that the city paid a ton of money for to take people from an area by the river that nobody can get to up to the top of “pill” hill where Oregon Health Science University is.) So he gets me close and I am looking around and at mu map and nothing is adding up. By this time I am way late, I don’t even want to know the time. I stop a girl and she says “Oh the building you want isn’t on the hill, it is down below, you’ll need to take thr tram to get there.” I think to myself crap, but at leat I get to ride the tram. You get a nice view of Portland and of the neighborhood that protested vehemantly by placing signs on thier roofs that said “%$#^ the tram”. Unfortunately the signs were no longer up. When I finaly got the nuerology dept. I realized my fears where for naught and they got me right in. I didn’t even have to wait.

So trip asside, the diagnosis was that I have ms. Dr. Edgar put me through all the tests and determined that I am not showing any signs of symptoms or that would send up warning flags that the ms is progressing. Basically I am your standard relapsing/remitting ms person. He did say I was in good health and that given that and how I responded to the testing that I have a good chance of no progressing quickly. He looked at my MRI with another Dr and student and they came back to say keep doing what you are doing, especially when it comes to exercise.

I had pretty much accepted the fact that I have ms, so I decided to try to understand as much about running and ms as I could from this visit. Both doctors assured me that running and the exertion wasn’t going to futher the progress of the disease at all. I had been a little concerned that by pushing it and bringing on potential psuedo attacks (or incidents of elevated symptoms, in my case the spells), that I may be doing damage. They both assured me that all resaearch indicates that this is not the case. They have several ms patients who run marathons as well and they absolutely agree that exercise has a positive effect on ms patients. Hurray!