Posted 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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It was March 2009. I was 39 years old. One morning, I woke up feeling significant pressure behind my left eye. I felt it mostly in the right corner of my eye, but assumed it would go away as quickly as it came. After a day or two, I thought it could be a sinus […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in MOG, ON, Proche-aidant.e, Voices of NMO
Virginia was only 10 when, while checking the mail one day in April, she noticed a grayness in her vision, “like leaves creeping up from the bottom of my eye.” The strange phenomenon went away in a few minutes. Her mother, Kimberlie, attributed the problem to Virginia’s allergies. But when the vision problem returned, they […]
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I was 33 years old in 1993, when I experienced a sudden attack of optic neuritis, an inflammation that damages the optic nerve causing vision loss. A small black dot, obstructing the vision in my left eye turned into complete blindness in that eye in a matter of days. While admitted to Upstate University Hospital […]
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It was the late 1990’s. I was in my 30’s had constant pain down my left arm, and even though I couldn’t tie the symptoms down to any single event, my orthopedic surgeon had me on the surgery schedule assuming I needed a spinal fusion to fix a slipped disc. Then my MRI results came […]
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I have a rare, chronic neurological disease that affects my central nervous system. It’s caused me to become temporarily half-blind and feel throbbing pain everywhere… I was diagnosed with Neuromyelitis optica (NMO) also known as Devic’s disease (similar to MS) last month after my MRI scans showed optic neuritis and brain lesions — and it’s completely shattered […]
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Life before NMO – I was an active mom, worked as a home health nurse case manager and an avid marathon/half marathon runner… Before work, I would wake up at 4:30 am most mornings and meet my running buddies for a six mile run. On Saturday’s, we would do our long runs which were 13-21 […]
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Paula is a walking miracle. She looks good, feels good and can do most everything she ever did in her life, though she is now eligible for senior discounts. Paula has NMO. Lupus. Hashimoto’s Disease. Sjogren’s Syndrome. Raynaud’s Syndrome. Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS). Fibromyalgia. When she was just 15, Paula was diagnosed with Idiopathic thrombocytopenic […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, Patient.e, TM, Voices of NMO
I was diagnosed with Neuromyelitis Optica on July 25, 2015. My story is a little different than many of the stories I’ve heard or read about because my symptoms started only 11 days earlier. I had a fever and began to have pain in my hands. Over the course of the next few days, my […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in MOG, Patient.e, Voices of NMO
Liz has had NMO for 25 years now. She’s only known it for ten… Since she’d had migraines throughout her childhood, Liz and her mother didn’t think too much of it when, at age 11, the “migraine” around her left eye was so bad that she thought she needed glasses. But obligingly, her mother […]
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