D is for disease-free

It was a few months before Ana Claudia Domene’s 40th birthday when she woke up one morning with a strange tingling sensation in her feet. She must have exercised too much the day before, she thought, but as the day wore on the tingling spread up her calves and into her thighs.

By the time Domene finished work, it was like she was wearing an electrical body suit up to her neck. “My whole body tingled for an entire month,”she recalls. “I lost control of my right arm so I couldn’t even hold a blow-dryer in my hand, my left leg became weak, but the extreme fatigue was terrible.” She remembers sitting on the couch one day, acutely aware of the strain on each of the muscles she was using in her neck and back to stay upright. “Just sitting was intensely exhausting,”she says. For five weeks in 2008, Domene endured a battery of scans, blood tests and a spinal tap, which finally confirmed a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS), an autoimmune disease that develops when the body’s own immune system begins to destroy the protective sheath that surrounds nerve cell fibers throughout the body and brain, like insulation around electrical wires. As her nerves were being stripped, she was experiencing some of the broad range of MS symptoms that result from chaotic and interrupted nerve signaling in her body. Scans revealed six lesions in Domene’s brain and two on her upper spine—a 1.5 centimeter lesion in her upper neck and a smaller one just beneath it. Given its presentation, her MS was classified as “aggressive.”