A popular theory is that an MS patient's immune system was sensitized by exposure to some virus or substance that looks "close enough" to myelin to their body's immune system, triggering an their immune system to attack their myelin long after the outside threat has gone. This exposure is thought to occur during the patient's childhood or teenage years. The neural damage is detected quickly in many people, while in others it accumulates gradually and the symptoms go unnoticed until later in life. It is not known whether this theory is true, and if so, what the agent could be, although there are many candidates including the canine distemper virus.
As they say, "Hindsight is 20/20". In hindsight, I should have known that I had MS much earlier. I really should have known in 1997. You see, I learned to ski (snow ski that is) late in life at the ripe old age of 28. You see, I spent my teenage years growing up in a subtropical paradise a thousand miles away from snow. However, I got into the habit of attending a conference in Denver, Colorado around Thanksgiving once a year from 1987, and an associated workshop that "just happened" to be held in a ski resort like Vail for a few days afterwards. It was incredible. We'd start work at 7am, attend lectures until 10am and then hit the ski slopes. We'd come off the slopes late in the afternoon and attend more lectures and discussions until midnight. And the next day we'd do it all over again, only harder. Every year I'd get a little better at skiing. By 1995 I was off the "bunny slopes" and onto the "blue diamond" slopes, meaning that I'd gone beyond being a total wuss to being a competent skier. But in 1997 I just couldn't get my legs to do what I wanted them to do, and I felt tired quickly. What the hell, I was 38 years old and working too hard, so nothing to worry about, right? But I quit going to that conference all the same.
Or maybe it was much earlier than that. Looking back, I could say that my first MS symptom appeared in 1973, in 9th grade. While standing outside on a Spring day my vision blurred and I saw multiple images, heard loud ringing in my ears, and experienced vertigo. I remember one of the prettiest girls in my class, named Mandy, looking at me and telling me "Wow, you look green, I've never seen anyone look that color before", and I remember feeling happy that she had even talked to me, after all I was a geek and she was cute. The feeling (the MS and the euphoria) passed in less than an hour, but I remember feeling very tired that day.
I also remember always winning the "pinching contests" on the school bus. The boys would pinch each other as hard as they could, mainly on the arms, in an attempt to get somebody to shout or lurch into the aisle and thus earn the ire of Stan the bus driver, of whom we were all in mortal fear. While normally an easy-going, friendly man, he had a quick temper and knew how to use it to subdue rowdy boys. Stan had part or all of his fingers missing on both hands, rumored (but never spoken openly to adults) to be from torture in a Japanese POW camp during World War 2. To get back to my subject, "pinching contests" often escalated to grabbing huge wedges of flesh on the arms of another boy and twisting savagely. It never seemed to hurt me so I was mostly left alone after some initial experimentation. I had studied some martial arts and absorbed some Zen philosophy along the way, so I wasn't real concerned. I just figured that I was learning to master my own body and mask pain. Perhaps it was the beginning of the numbness that I feel in my arms and hands now.
I also remember tiring more easily than all of the other teenagers. I couldn't run far in the school marathon (inflicted yearly on all of us, geek and jock) without slowing to a walk periodically. I couldn't jog, no matter how hard I trained. And I remember helping my father fix my first car, a 1954 Morris Minor, and not being able to hold up the muffler from underneath for more than 30 seconds as he tried to anchor it down. Still, being a weakling was consistent with a geek lifestyle, so nobody was concerned. I fought against it by playing squash and taking martial arts training, but I often got the feeling that everything was harder for me than it was for everybody else. I always felt that I always had to train harder to get the same results. But maybe this is just normal, healthy paranoia.
Speaking of martial arts, my sensei all criticized my seeming inability to relax completely - instead of being able to have them move my arms and legs into the correct position, I had to watch and feel them pushing and pulling and physically move my limbs into the correct place, often getting it wrong to their intense annoyance. Perhaps this was an early and light occurrence of the spasticity that plagues me today.
Are these really precursors of MS, or am I imagining things? From a distance of almost 30 years it is hard to tell.
I don't know if the following facts are relevant, but they are slightly unusual things about me. My body temperature always ran a little high, and my muscle tone has always been pretty good. I still weigh around 150 pounds in my early 40s - that reminds me of a great T-shirt that I saw on a geek in a restaurant last year. It said "Chicks dig pale skinny guys", which he was. On his arm was a stunningly beautiful and very shapely girl, so the T-shirt was particularly apt. It figures that finally geeks are considered stylish accessories by beautiful women, and I'm an "old guy" in my 40s with a wife and children. I admit that I was lucky enough to marry a very cute blonde babe, but damn, I always had to work so hard in my teens and 20s to get the cute ones to notice me.
One more weird thing. After having my legs covered in mosquito bites from thigh to ankle after a camping trip in the Australian bush - every inch of my legs was covered and I think that even the bumps had bumps - I suddenly became immune to them. Mosquitoes secrete an anticoagulant so that their little stomachs don't instantly become massive (from their point of view) blood clots, otherwise you would hear little screams and thuds as their aerodynamics switched from tiny stealth helicopter mode to tiny brick mode. A trace amount of this anticoagulant gets injected when they bite us, to which our bodies object strenuously, causing an allergic reaction that creates those little itchy bumps. Well, I haven't had any of those little itchy bumps for over 25 years. Mosquitoes bite me sure enough, but my body just doesn't react to them. (And no, I haven't tracked any to see whether there are any little screams and thuds.) Is this a side effect of my MS? Did an overdose of mosquito anticoagulant give me MS? Or was one of the little pests carrying the virus or other agent that gave me MS? Or am I just weird? I dunno.