A bride has told how her dreaded ‘hangover’ turned out to be a sign of MS.
Emily McColgan-Upfold, from Northern Ireland, struggled to bend down the day after her hen-do in March 2023.
Understandably, she assumed she wasn’t experiencing more than a few pains from the night before.
But over the next few weeks and months, the 30-year-old’s strength, balance, vision, hearing and speech rapidly deteriorated.
Demanding answers as to the cause of her bizarre symptoms, Ms McColgan-Upfold, who works in education, sought medical attention.
Emily McColgan-Upfold, from Northern Ireland, struggled to bend down the day after her hen-do in March 2023
So just three days before she was due to marry her partner of 11 years, Stephen’s worried doctors rushed her in for an emergency MRI scan.
This left the bride-to-be’s wedding day in tatters as she nervously awaited the results.
Her wedding to Stephen went ahead as planned, although Mrs McColgan-Upfold was ‘terrified of falling’ and ‘couldn’t really walk steadily’.
Her results, which told her she had MS, came just days after she tied the knot while at the airport about to fly on her honeymoon to Greece.
Recalling the moment, Mrs McColgan-Upfold told MailOnline: ‘I cried and completely broke down.
‘I’m sure people were looking at me, but it was as if time and space had ceased to exist.
‘They told me I had enhanced lesions on my brain and spinal cord and demyelination, which was most likely MS.
‘I felt like my whole world had just collapsed.’
MS is a neurological condition that affects the brain and spinal cord and causes a wide range of potential symptoms, including the problems Mrs McColgan-Upfold suffered before she was diagnosed.
With MS, the immune system goes haywire and mistakenly attacks the myelin sheath in the brain and spinal cord.
The NHS advice page says: ‘This is the layer that surrounds your nerves, protects them and helps electrical signals travel from the brain to the rest of the body.
‘Attack causes the myelin sheath to become inflamed in small spots, which can be seen on an MRI scan.
‘These patches of inflammation can interfere with messages traveling along the nerves. It can slow them down, mix them up, send them the wrong way or stop them altogether’.
Even before the diagnosis, the worrying symptoms marred what should have been one of the happiest days of Mrs McColgan-Upfold’s life.
“Our wedding day was supposed to be such a special, happy day, but it had such an ominous gray cloud hanging over it,” she said.
‘I thought I would be more excited and giddy with nerves, but instead I was very careful not to give away that I was sore and exhausted.
‘I had bad muscle weakness from the numbness so I was worried about falling and I was struggling to get into my dress so my mum had to help me.
‘I (also) couldn’t really walk calmly or hold anything too heavy in my left hand, I had migraines and dizziness on and off and had constant back, hip and leg pain; and I struggled with my hearing and sight.’
Mrs McColgan-Upfold said the ordeal has now left her looking back on her big day with “mixed emotions”.
“I just wish I could have felt the way I thought I would, and I feel sorry for the girl who was afraid of what was coming,” she said.
Determined to enjoy her honeymoon in Greece, Mrs McColgan-Upfold waited until she was home before undergoing further tests to decide her treatment options.
While she expects to start treatment for MS soon, Ms McColgan-Upfold has also made changes to her lifestyle to help with the pain the condition causes, including cold water swimming and ice baths.
She has also started one Instagram account to document the ups and downs of her journey.
“If you asked me six months ago what my future would look like, I would have said bedridden or in a wheelchair with no hopes or dreams,” she said.
‘An MS diagnosis brings with it a lot of uncertainty. I’ll never know if I’ll relapse or if my disease will progress, but I’ve learned that we shouldn’t really worry about things that are out of our control.
Understandably, she assumed she wasn’t experiencing more than a few pains from the night before
“Yes, things may take me a little longer, sometimes the house won’t be as tidy as it used to be, but living with MS is just living.”
Mrs McColgan-Upfold still manages to enjoy life despite occasionally struggling with activities she used to do without thinking.
“Of course there are times when I’m upset, especially when there are things I used to be able to do with ease that are now a struggle, such as putting on my shoes, opening bottles and jars, cooking or prepare a meal and clean my house, she said.
‘But I choose every day to wake up and fight MS and to do things that make me happy. The future for me is hopeful.’
Mrs McColgan-Upfold said she hopes research will help MS sufferers in the future and plans to help raise awareness for people with the disease.
“I want to continue to raise awareness about MS and build a community of chronic disease warriors who lift and support each other through the good times and the hard times,” she said.
‘When I was first diagnosed I went straight to Google and the images of elderly people in wheelchairs, the horror stories of falls and choking and discovering the average life expectancy of 40 years after diagnosis sent me spiraling into a dark place where I had given up.
‘But if you look, you’ll find that there are hundreds if not thousands of MS warriors online who choose to find joy every day, choose to fight the stigma and choose to carry on against all odds.
‘They helped me realize that MS doesn’t have to be as bad as a Google search tells you it will be. We didn’t choose to have MS, but we can choose how we react to it.’
But just three days after tying the knot while at the airport shopping for sunscreen for her honeymoon, she was given the devastating diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.
Ms McColgan-Upfold hopes that other people diagnosed with MS remember that it is not the end.
“For people who have MS or have recently been diagnosed with MS, I would love them to know that MS is obviously a life-changing diagnosis, but it doesn’t have to be life-ending,” she said.
‘It certainly doesn’t have to be the end of your hopes and dreams.’
Scientists are still trying to pinpoint exactly what triggers MS.
It is currently suspected to be caused by a combination of genetics and one or more external factors.
Theories include lack of vitamin D, exposure to smoking, teenage obesity and a consequence of viral infections.
For reasons that experts do not yet understand, women are two to three times more likely to develop MS than men.
MS typically develops when people are between their 20s and 40s, although it can affect any age.
There is no cure, and treatments instead focus on controlling and alleviating MS’s many symptoms, as well as slowing its progression if possible.
Treatment depends on the type of MS a patient has.
Relapsing remitting MS is the most common type, accounting for 8 to 9 out of every 10 cases.
A person with this type of MS may have episodes where new or worsening MS symptoms return in periodic flares. Periods between relapses, which can last years in some cases, are called remission.
The second type of MS is called primary progressive. In this type, there are no relapses or periods of remission, the symptoms just get progressively worse.
People with relapsing remitting MS can also go on to develop the progressive form of the condition, this is called secondary progressive MS.
Specific MS treatments, which include both drugs and therapies, vary from person to person depending on their symptoms and the specific nature of their condition.
Medicines designed to reduce the frequency or severity of relapses, as well as potentially slow the progression of MS, are divided into two broad types.
First-line treatments are those that are generally less effective but have fewer, potentially debilitating, side effects.
Second line treatments are the opposite, more effective but with a higher risk of suffering severe side effects.
These treatments are typically only given to people with relapsing remitting MS, as they typically do not benefit people with the progressive form, who still suffer the side effects regardless.
An estimated 130,000 people in the UK have MS, according to the charity MS Society UK, with 7,000 people diagnosed each year.
About 1 million Americans are also thought to have MS.