Center for Social Innovation

In 1976, during a backpacking trip through Europe with my girlfriend, I lost the vision in my right eye and soon after experienced a peculiar numbness from the waist down. A doctor there told me that I might have multiple sclerosis (MS). I’d never heard of it. I was 20 years old.

When I returned to the United States, a neurologist confirmed what the doctor in Germany suspected. I had a relapsing-remitting form of MS in which my immune system, without warning, would attack the insulating substance on the nerves in my brain and spinal cord, called myelin. These attacks would weaken or disrupt the electrical signals passing among my nerve cells, ... Read more