Filmmaker Gets Real on Living With MS: “It Affects Your Mental Health”

Photo courtesy of Marti Hines One morning in 2018, Marti Hines woke up to something she never could have imagined. She discovered that the left side of her body was completely paralyzed.  A few weeks prior, she noticed tingling in her extremities, however, she didn’t give it too much thought because she thought it was a result of traveling.   At the time, she was 35 and on a family vacation.  “When I woke up paralyzed, I felt a sharp pain and then the paralysis set in and I was terrified. We weren’t sure what was wrong with me. The emergency room doctors initially thought that I perhaps had a stroke, but cognitively I didn’t have any other symptoms that normally happen when someone has a stroke and so there was just a lot of fear and urgency on the emergency room doctors, which really played a part in my mental state because I just didn’t know what was going on and I was really scared,” Hines recalls. Hines didn’t officially learn what was going on with her until she was transferred to a larger hospital to take an MRI. “A nurse came in to tell me that I was being...