How I beat MS
Palmer Kippola was a happy, healthy, well-adjusted 19-year-old girl living in Santa Monica, California. She had just returned home from college and was working a summer job as a hostess at a local restaurant. One morning she woke up, and the soles of her feet were tingling, similar to the feeling you get when you sleep wrong on an arm or leg and the blood flow gets reduced.
She didn’t think anything of it and figured it would go away. But the tingling sensation crept up her legs, and by lunchtime it had reached her knees. That’s when she knew something was wrong and called her parents.
The family doctor recommended a neurologist at UCLA, and by the time Palmer got to the office the tingling had crept up to her stomach. “The neurologist had me walk across the floor heel to toe, then touch my fingers to my nose to test my reflexes,” says Palmer.
“It was literally a five-minute meeting, at the end of which she announced,‘I’m 99 percent certain you have multiple sclerosis. There’s nothing you can do except take medication and prepare for a life in a wheelchair.’”
This was back in 1984. Neither Palmer nor her parents had ever heard of multiple sclerosis, or MS. She remembers by the time she went to bed that night after returning home from the neurologist, the tingling had reached her neck and was rapidly turning to numbness. “I remember getting into bed and my mom held me close,”she says. “But
