Have you ever felt like your life is unraveling in slow motion right in-front of your very eyes? Been completely overcome by fear? Consumed by worry, not just for yourself, but for your entire family? Felt something was taking control of your body, making it do strange unnatural things, and all the while your brain is being seriously uncooperative? The only thing that feels remotely right is a deep and prolonged (like all day) nap?

Sounds pretty bad, right? Well, don’t worry…it actually gets much worse. Imagine, on top of all that turmoil you’re prepping for a career-impacting annual budget meeting. It’s not just any meeting; it’s a high-stakes arena where a bunch of seasoned, highly skilled, and motivated VPs aggressively stake their claim (think Tom Cruise in Far and Away ☘️). A corporate steel cage match where a select few emerge as clear winners, others survive yet almost always wounded to some degree. If the meeting goes poorly there’s usually a casualty. Over the years, that casualty was often the person sitting in the very chair that I happened to occupy.

This wasn’t just some bad fever dream, it was my reality 20+ years ago. At the time, I had absolutely no clue what was happening to me. My body was failing, my mind was clouded, I found myself endlessly searching for an answer to the burning question: What the hell is happening to me? After a couple of years of cycling thru dozens of doctors/neurologists, a short term disability, and multiple tertiary care hospital stays, the eventual (and quite frankly patently obvious) diagnosis of Relapsing-Remitting MS (RRMS) had finally arrived. This was the diagnosis that I had chased for so long, yet it now somehow seemed almost inconsequential. Yes, it brought medical clarity to my life, but by that point, I had already conceded to the reality that I was going to be living the rest of my life with some type of strange illness. So now that I officially knew what I was up against (and it wasn’t great) the real question was this: what was I going to do about this giant mess that was otherwise known as my life?

Turns out…there was hope.