multiple sclerosis

It’s Here! Nobel week is Here!

Today the first of the Nobel prizes for 2025 was awarded and I was deeply moved to realize that this award speaks directly to me and my autoimmune disease. These three remarkable individuals, decades ago, did research and followed some science questions and interests and what they investigated has moved the needle forward on possible treatments for me. For me.

Honestly, though I love all the awards, I’m usually just waiting for peace and literature, but today was meaningful in a whole different direction which I was not expecting.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025

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ALT

Guinea pig for SCIENCE! This is my second year on this study, and one of the few upsides of having a chronic disease is the ability to be a part of research for better understanding of the disease.

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Anecdotal evidence first iteration: life in an immunocompromised status

I have always been ridiculously healthy. I have always been the person that never gets sick. I have always been the person who is never absent from work.

And then I was put on a DMT (disease modifying therapy) that kicks my immune system in the teeth and tells it to stay down, back down, turn off, quit doing the thing.

People say this means more sick more often and for longer.

I wondered what this meant.

Since I started my therapy in the midst of COVID, for a while nothing happened. We were all masking. No one was getting sick. Not even immunocompromised me.

Then this fall, it happened. My students coming to school sick (just like the old days), unmasked and coughing all over me. Strep going around like wildfire. Flu everywhere. Pink eye, if you can believe it, and I cannot remember the last time a bunch of my learners got pink eye. Children bleary and snotty and barky with chest deep coughs.

I got sick with not COVID, not flu, not strep. (I was tested for those.) My partner got sick as well.

Here’s the difference:

He felt run down and congested for three days.

I was sick for eleven days. For two of those days I did nothing but lay down and try to sleep, incapable of anything useful. For four of them I felt really awful, worse than I can remember feeling in ages and ages. The recovery was sloooooow.

That’s the difference between an immune system that works and one that doesn’t. And now I know.

(I still did not miss work, by the way. The two corpse days were over the weekend).

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