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Here's to Hope

Hello everyone, 

I'm not sure who's reading this or if anyone is at all but I'm going to give this a whizz.

My name is Noor. I'm 23 years old and I was diagnosed with Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis back in December 2014. MS is an autoimmune condition which means your immune system starts attacking healthy body tissue. With MS, it destroys the protective sheaths around your nerves in your brain. This in turn disrupts signals trying to get the brain, leading to various symptoms which differ from person to person. It can lead to spasticity in different parts of the body, visual loss or disturbance and fatigue. I'd never really heard of MS pre-diagnosis and wasn't really familiar with what impact it could have on my body. I found it very scary taking in all this information and I can't say it was easy to accept what the doctors were saying.

I was talking to a friend yesterday about how much I had wished I'd had someone my age to speak to when I first got diagnosed 8 months ago. I felt really alone, afraid and like no one really understood what I was going through. It was a massive shock to the system and it really didn't help being told it was going to be fine or that it could be cured (I kid you not, people tried telling me that and how I wish it could be cured!). All I wanted was to find someone my age going through the same thing as myself so we could kind of freak out together and work through it. 8 months later, I'm in a very different place; I am happy, I'm travelling, I'm enjoying myself and I have an incredible support system of friends and family that have stood by me all the way. 

The one thing that really stood out to me when I was first trying to find out about what was going on with my brain was that the web was littered with anger and horror stories and everywhere I looked to shed some kind of light made me feel so much worse. There is a lot of negativity out there and understandably so, this condition isn't exactly the most wonderful occurrence for any human being. But I just wanted to know that there was a way to live and deal with what was happening and that I could still have a life. This is what lead to me start this project.

More recently I've found myself talking to friends and colleagues about how important it is to not take a single day for granted and to make sure we are living life to the fullest. That really goes for everyone. You don't know what blessings you have until something you always counted on disappears or changes and you're left short, somewhere between despair and denial. I feel like I've had to make a lot of changes in my life to make sure I'm the healthiest, most upbeat and resilient person I can be and so I thought why not share it with others. I'm no doctor nor expert on MS, but what I do know is there is a way forward and I can do this. Loads of people out there live relatively normal lives despite their circumstances, be it a health condition or a personal battle. There is a way forward through any difficulty and so I wanted to share with you, on a regular basis how I keep happy, healthy and how I cope on a daily with MS. It's not always going to be plain sailing, nor will it always be easy, but I believe there's a way to find strength and light in every situation and so that's what I'm going to do.

I hope you enjoy reading this and you share it with others. I'm not going to let this beat me so watch this space ;)














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