The doctors in St. Louis were pretty confident. They didn’t know what was ailing my wife, but one of them said, “Well, at least we know it isn’t multiple sclerosis.”
The doctors in St. Louis were pretty confident. They didn’t know what was ailing my wife, but one of them said, “Well, at least we know it isn’t multiple sclerosis.”
We were taken aback because at the time, we didn’t know anything about multiple sclerosis, but we thought anytime a doctor rules out a disease, it’s a good thing, right? Turns out the doctor was wrong. In 1988, another doctor (this one in Chicago) was even more sure that it was multiple sclerosis. It was the beginning of an odyssey that has had many ups, and many downs, but it set me on a course to find out as much about this disease as possible.
Turns out, the doctors in St. Louis were merely playing the odds. Multiple sclerosis, a neurological disease that causes the body’s immune system to actually attack its nerve cells, is considered much more prevalent among non-Blacks. The doctors figured that a Black woman was less likely to have the disease, so they ruled it out. But in the 22 years since that diagnosis, I have met dozens of Black people with the disease. It may be rare (it is estimated that 400,000 Americans have multiple sclerosis), but almost everyday I meet a new person who knows someone, who is married to someone, or who has a family member with the disease, and all of them are Black.
Oh yeah, one of them is Michelle Obama, whose father, Fraser, lived with the disease for more than 20 years. Good thing the doctors didn’t just rule it out for him (it is also supposed to be more prevalent among females).
I don’t mean to disparage the doctors because they are only practicing medicine, and they are certainly allowed to be wrong, but 18 years ago, a doctor counseled my wife to end her pregnancy because he felt that a pregnancy could negatively affect her multiple sclerosis and even worried that we might have a “special needs” baby as a result. We figured we already had a special needs mother, so we’d just deal with a special needs baby. Turns out that the pregnancy was the best thing for my wife’s health – something about those natural steroids that come along with pregnancy – and she was stronger during the pregnancy than at any other time. The only problem with my daughter is that I’ve spoiled her. That is my special need.
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