A CRUEL TWIST OF FATE

After losing her mum to MS, Lehann Lattimore, 50, learnt the condition was plaguing her family again

- SARAH WHITELEY

The consultant’s words rang around the room. ‘The MRI results show various lesions on Alice’s brain,’ he said. ‘They are  suggestive of multiple sclerosis.’ Looking at Alice, my 14-year-old daughter, I felt my head start to spin. It couldn’t be true, it just couldn’t. Because I knew, better than anyone, just how cruel a condition multiple sclerosis, or MS, was. After years of watching my mum Alison deteriorate from it she’d finally succumbed to the disease aged just 66. We’d held her funeral just the week before. And yet, here we were, with my husband and Alice’s dad Mike, at hospital, being told my teenager may have it too and I was overcome with fear and panic.

When I was a child, Mum had always been active, going running and doing yoga. I’m not sure exactly when she was diagnosed with MS – an awful disease that affects the central nervous system, stopping the brain from sending signals to the rest of the body – the change was so gradual. But by my early 20s, she’d had to stop driving, she gave up working in a care home and her mobility started to be affected.

SLOW DECLINE

By the time she was in her late 50s, Mum was in a wheelchair full-time. She never complained, but now I look back and wonder at what she was going through and what she was keeping from us, even when we were adults.

At the time though, it was perfectly normal for me to take my two children, Charlie and Alice, round to her house. One of them would help feed her lunch and they loved sitting on her lap for a ride on her wheelchair when we took her out for the day.