COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho ? Rami Amaro can tell as soon as she wakes up if it's one of the bad days.
Maybe she can't move her right arm, or she can't see out of one eye.
The worst days she'll feel the banding - cruelly nicknamed the "MS hug" - where the muscles around her rib cage squeeze her like a python.
"It's incredibly painful," the Hayden mother said, shaking her head. "It's hard to make plans for anything, because we just never know what that day is going to be like."
The problems had been a mystery for two years until 2007, when doctors finally diagnosed Rami with multiple sclerosis, an auto-immune disease that disrupts the brain's ability to send messages to the rest of the body.
But after this winter, Rami might never have to dread another morning again.
The 41-year-old is among only 18 individuals with MS in the country signed up to undergo a new treatment for the disease: A stem cell transplant.
Although only 70 have undergone the treatment in the last decade because of developing technology, the procedure boasts 60 to 80 percent success in stopping symptoms.
In one case the disease's damage was reversed to the degree that a man dependent on two canes could sprint up stairs again.
"If this is successful, this could be a huge deal for the MS community," predicted her husband, Lance.
And for Rami.
The symptoms have been pecking away at random to debilitate the mother of four.
Victims of MS can experience any variety of damage - from losing control of limbs to blindness to brain damage - and Rami has suffered both physical and cognitive symptoms.
So far it's cost her a 13-year career as a Coeur d'Alene attorney.
She retired last year as her long-term memory evaporated, she said, to the point that the briefs she once cranked out in four hours began consuming days of foggy rewriting.
continues...
http://www.theolympian.com/northwest/story/1036224.html
Maybe she can't move her right arm, or she can't see out of one eye.
The worst days she'll feel the banding - cruelly nicknamed the "MS hug" - where the muscles around her rib cage squeeze her like a python.
"It's incredibly painful," the Hayden mother said, shaking her head. "It's hard to make plans for anything, because we just never know what that day is going to be like."
The problems had been a mystery for two years until 2007, when doctors finally diagnosed Rami with multiple sclerosis, an auto-immune disease that disrupts the brain's ability to send messages to the rest of the body.
But after this winter, Rami might never have to dread another morning again.
The 41-year-old is among only 18 individuals with MS in the country signed up to undergo a new treatment for the disease: A stem cell transplant.
Although only 70 have undergone the treatment in the last decade because of developing technology, the procedure boasts 60 to 80 percent success in stopping symptoms.
In one case the disease's damage was reversed to the degree that a man dependent on two canes could sprint up stairs again.
"If this is successful, this could be a huge deal for the MS community," predicted her husband, Lance.
And for Rami.
The symptoms have been pecking away at random to debilitate the mother of four.
Victims of MS can experience any variety of damage - from losing control of limbs to blindness to brain damage - and Rami has suffered both physical and cognitive symptoms.
So far it's cost her a 13-year career as a Coeur d'Alene attorney.
She retired last year as her long-term memory evaporated, she said, to the point that the briefs she once cranked out in four hours began consuming days of foggy rewriting.
continues...
http://www.theolympian.com/northwest/story/1036224.html