by Stephen Blease

Last updated at 13:44, Wednesday, 27 June 2012

To look at, Sarah Ransley is the picture of health. You would never guess that she has a chronic illness – until she lists her symptoms.

Sarah Ransley

There is numbness, dizziness, nausea, balance and mobility problems, difficulties with dexterity, aches in different parts of the body – and overwhelming fatigue.

“I’ve been tired since I was 14,” she says.

Sarah, 26, is one of an estimated 1,000 people in Cumbria and 100,000 in the UK who are living with multiple sclerosis.

Reality TV star Jack Osbourne, son of rock star Ozzy and wife Sharon, recently announced he had been diagnosed with MS (weblink: What is MS?)

As with all celebrity-related news it is receiving a lot of attention.

Sarah is hoping this new attention could dispel some of the misconceptions about it. For one thing MS is not a terminal illness. It can leave you weak, disabled and feeling very unwell but it is not fatal, as some seem to believe.

It’s also extremely varied. “People think MS and they think ‘wheelchair’,” she points out. “There’s a lot more to it than that.”

Some people do need a wheelchair as the disease advances, but most, like Sarah, go through periods of feeling very unwell followed by periods when some of the symptoms subside partially or completely.

Sarah, of Newfield, Carlisle, is upbeat, articulate and happy to talk about the condition. “I’ve got a collection of multi-coloured walking sticks – one for each outfit!” she jokes.

But she remembers well the fear and isolation she felt when she first discovered she had a debilitating illness.

She had just turned 18 when the official diagnosis came, but the first signs emerged four years earlier – when she woke up one morning and found she couldn’t see.

“It was quite alarming,” she recalls. “I was blinking and had washed my eyes so I knew there wasn’t any sleep in them.”

By the time she visited the doctor her vision was coming back. “I think he thought I was trying to get a day off school! He passed it off as sleep in my eyes – but I knew it wasn’t that.”

Two years later more symptoms arose. “I was 16 and doing my AS levels when my arm went numb. The doctor said I had trapped a nerve.”

Others followed: “I went to my Saturday job but I wasn’t feeling quite right and I went straight to bed when I got home. On the Sunday I was feeling wobbly – I remember walking through the hall and stumbling.

“I went to school and was trying to write but my writing was everywhere. I was freaking out a little bit.”

At first the doctor put it down to a virus. But the following day he sent her to hospital. “Straight away they were looking for MS.” Two weeks after her 18th birthday it was confirmed.

There wasn’t just the fear of facing a terrible illness. “Was I going to be able to go to university, or go on my gap year to Australia, or go out clubbing?”

The answer was yes, but her reaction to the drugs prescribed left her too ill.

She was given the drug beta interferon – which helps some people but didn’t work for Sarah. “I had flu-like side effects. For 18 months I lay on the couch all day. I couldn’t even sit up for a cup of tea.”

Over the past 10 years however, Sarah has learned to cope well with her condition and is currently on a different drug which has almost no side-effects.

The chronic fatigue makes it difficult for those with the condition to work full-time but she says: “I work really hard at the physiotherapy and I work hard trying to do stuff for the MS Society.”

She is social secretary of the east Cumbria branch and three years ago she organised a fashion show that raised more than £2,500 – and came second in the national society’s Fundraiser of the Year Award.

Everyone handles illnesses in different ways and Sarah adds: “It’s not for me to tell people how to deal with it. But it’s not a terminal illness and most people live a normal life. It sucks, but not as much as you think it might.

“I had a hard time at the beginning but now I enjoy what I can. It is up to everyone to find their own way through, you might have a couple of tough years while you get your head round it, and adapt, but you do and you do get through it.”

Sarah Ransley runs a monthly social for those diagnosed with MS and is setting up a new social group for young parents with children of primary school age. For more information, call 07824 658 754.

• There is no known cure for MS but some drugs can alleviate the symptoms. Sarah Stables from Appleby tried the newest one this week – one of the first people in northern England to do so.

Like Sarah Ransley, she has “relapsing remitting” MS, in which symptoms come and go. She is in a relapse at the moment but says: “This new drug is supposed to stop relapses, or make them less severe if they do happen. I’m hoping it helps.”

Sarah, 28, and has been living with MS for five years now. “It started in May 2007,” she explains. “I was on holiday in Faliraki and I kept falling over in the middle of the day, but I was stone cold sober.”

A doctor diagnosed pernicious anaemia but it usually only affects elderly people and alcoholics, so she wasn’t convinced. Further tests were carried out – and just before Christmas Sarah received the news that it was MS.

But she has always been fiercely determined not to let it stop her. She continued in her job as a mental health nurse and now also has two children – Lucy, who turns three this week, and Steven, 18 months.

And she’s been cheerful and philosophical throughout. “I think my mum was more heartbroken than I was!” she remembers with a chuckle.

“Some people would want to curl up in a corner and die, but there’s no use crying over it. You’ve just got to work with the hand you’re dealt.”

Both sides of the family have been very supportive, helping with Lucy and Steven when necessary and Sarah reflects: “I’m very lucky – they’ve been fantastic.

“When I told my other half he said: ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ So I said: ‘Then when I can’t walk you’ll have to carry me about!’”

Lucy seems to understand that her mum isn’t well. “When I’m changing Steven’s nappy she will go and get the cream or the baby wipes – she’s really good. I think she knows about it, but I’d rather she didn’t.”

Sarah has had five relapses since she was diagnosed. “They seem to come about once a year,” she explains. “I got poorly last Christmas and at the moment I’m still not very well. I get double vision but I don’t have any pain.”

Fatigue is one of the most common symptoms. “I can’t hang the washing out, I can’t push the pram or walk anywhere at the moment. But everyone gets tired.

“You just get on with it. It sounds brutal but you’ve got to pick yourself up and get back on the horse.”

First published at 11:25, Wednesday, 27 June 2012
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk