Healing Is Wholistic
vBy Aimee Huntley
Having good health is easy to take for granted when all the other hurdles of
daily living keep our attention focused elsewhere. But once something in our
bodies mysteriously malfunctions, we are often taken completely off guard,
and may feel very frightened and powerless. Most people expect changes to
occur with age and dismiss minor things like diminishing eyesight, hearing, or
weight gain to the process of maturing. In 2010, Karen Jelsma attributed her
headaches and recent cognitive changes to menopause. In 2013 she surprised
everyone at the Minnehaha County Jail in Sioux Falls, when she decided to
retire from her position as a well-liked correctional officer. She felt that she was
forgetting some of the things she needed to do for the job at the jail. Another
symptom Karen would acquire is unilaterally called brain fog. “I would read
something and know that I saw the words, but I couldn’t understand what they
meant.”
It wasn’t until March 4, 2014 that Karen’s health took a decided nose dive.
“I remember the exact date, because it was my dad’s birthday. It started with a
severe headache that got so bad it hurt to blink. By the next day, I had lost my
vision. I pretty much lost use of everything on my right side. I would fall down
because, I couldn’t feel anything, and my nervous system had shut down. I
couldn’t hold dishes. Some mornings I had to lay there and wait for my nervous
system to start working, just so I could get out of bed.”
Karen had initially gone to the Yankton Medical Clinic, but was referred
right away to a neurologist in Sioux Falls. Subsequent MRI’s revealed five
lesions in her brain. In addition to the vision loss, the neurologist also noticed a
drop in her walk. Drop foot is a condition commonly found in people suffering
from MS. It’s caused by nerve damage to the ankle muscles that make it difficult
to lift the foot properly, which disrupts normal walking. Due to the culmination
of symptoms and the MRI results, a formal diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis was
made.
Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease where the immune system goes
haywire and starts attacking healthy tissues in the body. With MS it specifically
destroys the myelin sheath that covers and protects the nerve fibers in the
spinal cord and brain. Once the nerve fibers are damaged, communication
between the brain and body is altered and may show up in negative
symptoms. Depending on where the nerve damage occurs and the duration,
this respectively determines the locations, types and severity of symptoms.
While MS isn’t usually fatal, it is a chronic, progressive disease that can still be
debilitating and cause permanent loss of mobility and other disabilities.
Karen says after she was diagnosed, “the doctors gave me this book about
MS and what to expect, and it was so bleak. It took about three months after I
got off my pity pot to finally decide to start doing some searching for answers.”
This was because she was still having worsening symptoms all the time, even
while on the drug Teclavir. Teclavir is a commonly prescribed drug for MS that
costs around $5500 retail. Karen’s monthly portion was around $200. “I was
applying for disability and only had my retirement check. I started watching
online videos about MS, because I couldn’t focus enough to read a book, and
24vHERVOICEvSEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018