Lindsay Kelly, a multiple sclerosis (MS) caregiver advocate, shares her family’s experience navigating MS treatments, side effects, and quality-of-life trade-offs while adapting care over time.
Transcript
When me and my husband got married, he had relapsing-remitting MS. He was on a medication that would make him sick for the whole weekend.
He had to take a shot that was almost making him more sick than the actual MS.
There were times where it was like, “What do we do here in this situation? I mean, do you want to live half your life having the flu? Your quality of life just with that medication is actually not great. Like that’s making your quality of life not great.”
We kind of made a decision that maybe we would stop taking that shot. He and I got married. It was 23 years ago, and there’s been so many advancements in medication since then.
He has been on other medications now, which made me nervous because of my experiences with the other stuff, where I’m like, “Is this going to make you more sick than the actual MS is doing to you?”
I’ve had to work with psychiatrists and the neurologist for his to make sure that the treatments don’t interact with the psychiatric medication, too. And so that’s been kind of a balance that we’ve, we’ve had to face with medications in general.
You just have to see if it’s something that’s going to work for you. One MS medication will work for one person fabulously, and for another person, either not do anything or even have reverse side effect.
