I Was Diagnosed With MS at 20—After My Doctor Completely Dismissed My First Symptom

Tenley Diaz, 31, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 2012 when she was 20 years old. MS is a neurodegenerative disease that causes the immune system to attack myelin, the protective coating that covers the nerve fibers. The ensuing inflammation and damage interrupt communication between your brain and the rest of your body, setting off a wide array of potential symptoms like muscle numbness and weakness, tremors and coordination problems, blurry vision, slurred speech, and heavy fatigue, among others.

It was a diagnosis Diaz didn’t see coming. Her first doctor dismissed her initial symptoms, and it took a few tries to find a specialist she trusted. But she found the care she needed—and trusted her intuition that something just wasn’t right. Here’s her story, as told to health writer Korin Miller.

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I was a college student just shy of my 21st birthday when my left big toe went numb. I was enrolled in a really competitive major, so I mostly ignored it for a few days. But then I started noticing another unusual symptom.

At first, I thought I had a random patch of dry skin on my left thigh—until I eventually realized what was actually happening: I wasn’t feeling my hand touching my skin at all. This sparked a week-long adventure of me half-thinking that I was losing my mind.

I finally decided to see a general practitioner about this sudden numbness developing in my body. His response: My pants were too tight. I was advised to take some ibuprofen and wear sweatpants for a few days because he believed I had a pinched nerve—again, allegedly from my too-tight pants. I did not receive this very well, as you can imagine. (My pants were definitely not tight enough to pinch a nerve!)

The next day, things got worse. I went numb from the waist down and every step that I took caused a pins-and-needles sensation in my feet. I called an internist I had seen for migraine headaches in the past—there was no way I was going back to the tight-pants doctor—and got an appointment scheduled ASAP. My internist listened to my history and something seemed to click: “I think you have MS. I’m sending you downstairs for an MRI right now,” he said, and so I immediately went in for imaging.

Sure enough, thinking back to my symptoms now, the skin I couldn’t feel on my thigh wasn’t dry or “dead”—my brain just wasn’t processing touch in that spot, because my test results were consistent with MS.

After my testing, finding the right specialist took some effort.

I took a few days off from school to process everything and to find a neurologist who could confirm the diagnosis and help guide my treatment. Luckily, most of my professors were very supportive and helped me rearrange testing and homework due dates to accommodate the few days I took off. (All except one, who ultimately needed a strongly-worded email to take me seriously and let me make up the work I missed.)

Source: SELF