What is MS

What is MS?
When Dr. Kovaleski diagnosed me with multiple sclerosis I knew very little about what it actually was.  I knew that it had something to do with nerve cells and muscles no longer working.  A little of what I knew I learned from watching the movie Lorenzo's Oil in which a kid developed something called leukodystrophy in which you rapidly lose all of your myelin leading to severe disability and eventually  death.
Although Dr. Kovaleski didn't really explain everything at the time, he told me enough so I was able to figure some things out, and what he didn't tell me I learned for myself.
In multiple sclerosis what happens is, the white blood cells get into the brain and attack the myelin which is the fatty tissue which surrounds brain nerve cells or neurons.  This causes inflammation of the myelin and eventually scarring.  The initial inflammation is what causes symptoms, and the scarring is what causes permanent disability.
In order to understand what happens you need to understand the immune system.  They call diseases like multiple sclerosis  autoimmune disease because it is a disease caused by one's own immune system.
White blood cells are what help us fight diseases.  When a virus enters your bloodstream, the white blood cells detect an intruder.  White blood cells are very sticky due to their structure.  They cling to the intruders and remove it from the bloodstream in order to keep you from being sick or help you to get well.  In people with multiple sclerosis, the  white blood cells are serious overachievers.  They are too sticky and thus stick to the blood cell walls.  Eventually they erode the blood cell walls and enter into parts of the body where they should not be.  Probably if they get into toe or finger it would have no impact.  However when they enter your brain they see the myelin as an intruder since it shouldn't be in your blood stream.  That's what makes the myelin to become irritated and  inflamed.  Steroid drugs like prednisone  decrease the inflammation.  They also do a lot of other things to bodies that are very harmful.  The treatments for MS are designed to keep you from having to have an exacerbation and thus have to have treatment with the steroid
drugs.
So the reason MS is not fatal initially, it's because you don't lose your myelin, you just get scarred up myelin.  The reason MS kills someone is because of the symptoms rather than the disease itself.
So my lifespan is not expected to be any different from anyone else's.  It's more about the quality of life.
That's my dry and boring blog for the day.  I hope you have a better layman's understanding of MS.
(my Dragon NaturallySpeaking kept trying to put "my ass" instead of MS in this post.  Aren't you glad that I'm not asking you to understand my ass?)