On the 29th October 2025, I was diognised with MS at the age of 18. I am starting this little page the day after, so I can write down my personal experience with MS, and that maybe one day it might help someone else or just help educate others, as I discover what MS is and the effects it may have on myself personally throught my life
What is MS?
It all started a week before the diognosis on Monday 22nd September. It was a normal day, I was working at my first job I started 3-4 weeks prior to that day. It was buisiness as normal, ans I was almost at the end of my shift, just an hour away, until when I turned around to grab something gehind me on the tills. When I turned my head, I suddenly got double vision, leving the world out of focus and making my head spin, disorientating me. This lasted a few seconds, and would start again everytime I turned to quickly. It just suddenly strted out of nowhere, no trigger, no obvious cause. At the time, I put it down to tiredness and dehydration, as I had a haabbit of forgetting to drink at work, so I decided it was probably nothing and I would just sleep it off that night.
When I woke up the next day it was worse... I had near constant double vision for a short while after I woke up, and I was unsteady on my feet bacause of it. I tried resting in the morining, but I was concerned anout the cause and how it had gotten worse, so when my mum came home in the early afternoon, I explained all my symptoms to her, and she immediatly took me to the local GP surgery as it was affecting my eyesight. Once down there, they did a general MOT to make sure I wanst activly dying (blood sugar, ECG, urine sample and some general eye movement tests). In the end, they put it down to vertigo, giving me some car sickness meds that also helps to clear inner ear infections.
The meds did not help, but being told it was just vertigo put my mind to rest, so I went about my normal day at work and decided to take off my glasses as I believed it helped if I didn't wear them, but in the evening, my family and I decided to try and book an emergency opticians appointment the next mornong if there were no changes to my eyes pr they got worse, which we ended up having to do, and they were able to see me just a few hours after the call that morning. I went in, and they were able to identify a weakness in the muscles around my eyes, which basically ment my brain was having trouble stiching the two images from my eyes together into one whole image. With this in mind, she didn't know the cause and decided to refer me to my nearest hospital, where they phones daying they could get me in out of hours, which at the time, I didn't realise what would happen after I steped foot into the hospital...
One we arrived, I went to the eye clinic I was booked for, where they repeated a few of the tests but the most notible was the most simple. follow the finger with just eye movements... For me, it felt like I knew my eyes could move further to the sides, but they ohysically couldnt move any further, and if I tried, they'd jump back. They called for second and thord opinions, ahowing my eye twitches when I looked to rhe side, and I figured if the docters were interested, there must be something wrong. After tehy, they determined that my eye health was pretty much perfect, and refered me to the AMU. When I got there, I had to wait around for a few hours, which was so hard becasue I didn't know what was going on and scared what it could be if it wasn't my eyes that were the issue.
After the wait, they eventually took me to a shared patient room, as it was past 9pm and the consultants had gone home, meaning I couldn't get an MRI that night, so they put a canula in my arm for some blood samples and gave me my in-patient wrist band. From there, I had lovely nurses look after me throught my evening and night there, and had an awful sleep as this was the first time I had ever had a cannula in my arm, and I was very scared of catching it or ripping it out in my sleep...