Posted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, Patient.e, Voices of NMO
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 MOG, NMO, Professionnels de santé, TM, Voices of NMO
Maureen is a nurse. She worked in neurocritical care at Johns Hopkins Hospital for many years before she had ever heard of NMO. But in 2007, shortly after Dr. Benjamin Greenberg joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins, he recruited her to work with him in neuroimmunology. It was there that she first came into contact […]
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, Patient.e, Voices of NMO
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
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, Voices of NMO
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 […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, ON, Patient.e, TM, Voices of NMO
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 […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, Patient.e, Voices of NMO
Imagine this: You’re driving on a highway, and suddenly, your hands stop working completely. You can’t grip the wheel. Imagine the terror and the confusion… And then imagine, that, thank goodness, your husband is in the car with you and takes over driving before you get into an accident. You assume something crazy happened and […]
Read MorePosted by: The Sumaira Foundation in NMO, ON, Patient.e, Voices of NMO
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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