The Great NetXperiment!

What’s it like being a medical student with multiple sclerosis?

Jenna Louise Duffy shares her experiences.

Why is it that when sometimes your life seems to be running smoothly, and you have so many plans of how you would like your life to be, something bad happens?”Jenna, you’re not a child anymore now: you’re 16 going on 17, and I think you are at the age where you can deal with certain things…” “Blah, blah, blah,” I thought as my consultant droned on with the same dreary comments, and I stared out of the hospital window.

These appointments were becoming a bit tedious. It was like having déjà vu. I stared out of the window. I kept thinking how excited I was about my plans for the weekend. My exams were approaching, and I just wanted to relax and have fun with my friends. My parents and I had come in for my routine appointment at the University of Wales College of Medicine. I had been called in for my appointment 10 minutes early, so my father was still outside parking the car. I had been unwell with “unusual symptoms” at 14 years old.

Magnetic resonance imaging and lumbar puncture had confirmed lesions on my brain. The doctors suspected a virus or just a one-off illness that could not be explained. I therefore had to attend appointments every six months “to keep an eye on” me. I was never given a diagnosis.Since then I had been free of symptoms. The initial symptoms of vertigo and optic neuritis I had had at that age had disappeared about four months after they started.

That is, until two months before my routine check-up at 16 years old. I had been worried about my AS levels, and trying to complete my application form for university so that it was perfect. My dream from 14 years old was to be a doctor. I knew I would have to make a good impression.

One weekend while I was revising I began to feel tremendous throbbing pains in the soles of my feet. I put it down to wearing ill fitting shoes. Two days later, the pain had been replaced with numbness and tingling that had now risen to my knees. My parents were concerned. Each day the numbness rose up my limbs, until one morning I awoke in a panic and pool of sweat because I thought my legs had disappeared.

The numbness had risen to the umbilical level. The embarrassment and anxiety of not being able to feel my feet in my shoes and feeling that my trousers had fallen down was really getting me down. It would send me into panic, frantically checking they were still there, no matter where I was, and who was watching. I continued the week as if I was in perfect health, stubbornly ignoring this problem as though it would disappear.It took days to get even an emergency appointment, but after a while I visited my general practitioner.

He referred me immediately to the paediatric consultant I have visited since age 14. Because my routine appointment with him was close anyway, the consultant felt no need for an emergency appointment. Even though everyone around me was worried, I felt as I did aged 14. I was naive, not at all concerned about what was wrong with me. I was in a daze, on a cloud where no one could touch me. It is hard to explain how you can feel totally oblivious to what is happening to you, even when you know it is serious. It is almost as if your brain switches off to all the negativity of the world and then drugs you with a happy pill to enable you to cope.It was in this state of enlightenment that I received my shock.

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