Posted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, ON, Patient.e, TM, Voices of NMO
My name is Kellin. I am a 28-year-old South African NMO patient and this is my story… Late in 2015, my father suddenly passed away. It was a shock to my system and I was not prepared for it. In the months/years to follow, I experienced weird symptoms – which I now know were due […]
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Freshman year of college is a time to form your sense of identity, but when I started school, I thought that forming this ‘new’ me meant dying my hair blue, not being diagnosed with neuromyelitis optica… On the night of September 27, 2017, I stayed up all night in my small dorm room coughing, with […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, ON, Patient.e, TM, Voices of NMO
My name is Mitchel Navarro. I’m 34 years old, a wife, and a proud momma to two beautiful children – a girl and a boy. I have a bachelors degree in elementary education and was a teacher when this journey began. My days would begin at 5 AM and I’d finally be able to crawl […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, ON, Patient.e, TM, Voices of NMO
Sunday 15 December 2013, on a friend’s farm in the beautiful little town of Dullstroom in Mpumalanga South Africa, started as blissfully peaceful as it sounds. This was to change from around noon that day when I started experiencing severe headaches and bouts of dizziness. I initially thought it was hay fever or something like […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, ON, Patient.e, TM, Voices of NMO
It started with a never-ending headache… Click the image below to watch Chasity’s video in which she describes her experience with optic neuritis. Although she has lost a significant amount of vision, Chasity believes that everything happens for a reason and is grateful to still be able to see her children every day through her […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, ON, Patient.e, TM, Voices of NMO
I can trace my first NMO symptoms back to when I was just 12 years old… I’d be walking down a flight of stairs and for a split second, it was as if a switch had been thrown, cutting off communication between my brain and my legs and I’d fall down the stairs. Sometimes I’d […]
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My name is Letitia and I am a 22-year-old South African NMO patient. My story began on the 26th of December 2017, Boxing Day… I had been suffering with an excruciating headache for the last 2 days. I eventually noticed that I also had trouble with my peripheral vision. After some online research, I came […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, ON, Patient.e, Voices of NMO
Five years ago, my oldest daughter and I were grocery shopping when it occurred to me that the grocery store looked foggy or smokey. When I asked her if she thought it looked the same, she gave me a “you’ve lost your mind” look. By the next day, my vision was gone in the left […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, ON, Patient.e, Voices of NMO
It was December 2019. I struggled almost every day with tension headaches (eyes and nose). My primary care doctor suspected I had migraines and prescribed me with migraine medication. I don’t like taking medication (never have) and stopped taking the pills after two days. I chose to fight the headaches… On Christmas Eve, I noticed […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, ON, Patient.e, TM, Voices of NMO
Hello, my name is James. I am 24 years old. I am a recent college graduate, a skateboarder, a geek, a lucky dude with an amazing family and friends. If you don’t get the opportunity to let me bore you by telling you about those things, you could probably look at me and just assume […]
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