SUBTLE REVOLUTION

In the treatment of M.S., small steps add up to a new approach to disease.

- RIVKA GALCHEN

ANNALS OF MEDICINE

In 2014, Erin Storch looked in the mirror and felt as if she were drifting leftward. It was a feeling she didn’t know how to fully describe. She had been on maternity leave, and had recently returned to her job at a hospital consultancy in Washington, D.C. Storch had been promoted while on leave, so she was learning something new at work—and it seemed strangely difficult to absorb the information. She was also pumping milk three times a day. People suggested that what she was experiencing might be profound exhaustion; she disagreed. “I knew in my gut that the way I was feeling was not within the spectrum of what you would consider normal,” she said.

There were further unsettling sensations: “Coffee tasted like water. The left side of my body was weak and numb.” Storch went to see her ob-gyn, who sent her for a CT scan. Nothing unusual showed up.

Storch’s son was six months old when her symptoms manifested. When he was seven and a half months old, she walked down the stairs while holding him, and fell. Her son was O.K. “But then I knew that something was really wrong,” she said. She found a new doctor, who sat with her and her husband “for maybe forty minutes. It was just a conversation—there wasn’t even a physical exam. He said to me that he knew a lot of moms with demanding careers and that this was not that.” She started to cry from the relief of being believed. He scheduled an MRI for that evening. “But since there was some time to kill I decided, being me, to go to work,” she said. She crashed her car into a pole in a garage on M Street.