So just a brief overview of what MS is............
MS is a autoimmune condition that affects the nervous system. Your brain and spinal cord make up your central nervous system, your brain controls what your body does such as its movements and thoughts and your spinal cord is the central message pathway where messages get sent from you brain and travel down it to different parts of your body controlling both the conscious and subconscious actions. In your nervous system you have nerve fibres and these are surround by a very important substance called myelin. The myelin helps messages travel between your brain and the rest of your body quickly and smoothly.
Now when you have MS your immune system whose job it is to fight off infection starts attacking your own bodies tissues mistaking them for a foreign body or an infection. In MS your immune system attacks the myelin resulting in it becoming damaged and it strips the myelin off the nerve fibres either partially or completely leaving scars known as lesions. The damage to the myelin can cause the messages that are sent down the nerve fibres to become disrupted, slow down, short circuit and pass from one nerve to another or not get through at all. This results in myelin loss but can also lead to nerve damage, which over time can lead to lasting disabilities occurring.
This information is from the MS societies website if you click on the following link it will take you to the relevant page with some helpful diagrams and a helpful analogy to simplify things further.
http://www.mssociety.org.uk/about_ms/what_is_ms/index.html
There are different types of MS and for me I fall into the category of relapse remitting. I won't discuss the other types of MS but for all areas of MS the MS Society has lots of valuable information available.
So relapse remitting MS (RRMS) is where most people start off. So basically there are periods or relapse and periods of remission. Relapses can be mild to severe and periods of remission can last from months to years. RRMS can be quite unsettling as there is a lot of uncertainty, any symptom can occur as a relapse. For example you can go from feeling perfectly normal one day to waking up with a strange symptom which can be quite minor like a little tingling in your fingers to pins and needles down your whole arm.
In the periods of remission you can experience some occasional symptoms that come and go such as tingling or numbness. Which can be quite frustrating and annoying.
As with most of my information, it comes from the MS Society so for more information follow this link : http://www.mssociety.org.uk/about_ms/types_of_ms/index.html
