In January of 2009 after a visit to the Doctor regarding the numbness I was experiencing from just below my breasts and going all the way down to the tips of my toes, I was diagnosed as having Multiple Sclerosis. This traumatic discovery devastated me, however, it explained the sudden weakness I experienced in my left arm roughly a year and a half before as well as my debilitating, extreme fatigue that had been plaguing me for some months, maybe even a year or so, really. Due to the career path I chose, which happens to be healthcare, I knew exactly what M.S. was and upon hearing my initial diagnosis, my heart dropped and almost immediately the tears fell from my eyes. I am a certified nursing assistant who had personally taken care of numerous M.S. patients who resided in nursing homes. Of course in the nursing home setting the people who live there due to M.S. are all in the last stages of progressive M.S., not the relapsing-remitting version of the disease as I have. Due to this fact, I thought that was where I was going to be in a few years. I wasn't aware that some go many, many years before progressing to that level of disability. My knowledge of M.S. was that once you are diagnosed it's a downhill road from that point on. Little did I know that there are many that never reach the progressive stage of the disease and that rather, they stay healthy and active until an exxacerbation occurs and after it is over the person is better. Almost as if they never had anything wrong with them. I just specifically remember stating somewhere around the ripe old age of 21 what a pain in the ass Multiple Sclerosis patients are and that I NEVER wanted to become one of them. HA! I guess the jokes on me. I strongly believe in Karma and think that this is Karma biting me in the butt.I say this because I wasn't really sympathetic to their demanding, controlling, and all around anal behaviors. At the time I truly believed that the M.S. patients were just difficult because they wanted to be. I never really thought about their potential reasons for having to have their knick-knacks in their room just so or why they were on the call light every five minutes for something I considered unimportant. I didn't, at that point in my life, have much patience for this. Had I just slowed down and just thought about why the M.S. patient acted out in these ways I may just have understood that it was their ONLY "control" in their life. Most of them had catheters so they could not even control when they urinated. Not to mention the fact the fact that they couldn't even have the choice of living on their own. Most of the time family members who were too busy to care for anyone but their own immediate family had placed the person stricken with such a disease into whatever nursing home had an open bed.........I'm getting tired I'll finish this another day.