career

Technical Difficulties – Please Stand By

April 3, 2016 by Will

I know it’s been a long time since there has been new content and that the site has been largely unmaintained, with the exception of regular WordPress updates. The good news is the site will be getting some love shortly. Real life has been happening over the last three years and it caught up with us.

Sara decided to return to school full time. School work has been incredibly time consuming and she has been cranking about ten blogs worth of essays and papers for the last three years. Her last day is Monday and then she graduates! Excitement all around.
We moved to the San Francisco, CA / Silicon Valley area just over two years ago for work. Between selling our home, moving cross country, and getting settled in new jobs we have been incredibly busy.
Sara is now seeing Neurologists at UCSF’s MS Research Center, one of the premier MS research facilities in the world. She has had a really incredible experience with the team there and is eager to share the details.
Sara has also had a lot of excitement with Gilenya over the last few years and would like to provide some updates there. Since she was an early adoptee once it passed the FDA trials, a lot of people have followed her experience.
Sara has had some interesting experiences trying to find a MS support group in the Bay Area and is hoping to have some better luck finding a new one soon.
I killed the forums about a year and a half ago. Vanilla Forums open source solution wasn’t getting much love, there were a ton of gaps in the spam prevention so people were trying to use it to run a link farm to ride our SEO rankings, and every time I did a WordPress update it broke the forums. Our hope was that it would foster rich engagement among a community of like minded MS sufferers and their support networks, but it never got off of the ground. We may revisit it once the site is going again.
The plugins, themes, and site in general have not had a lot of love over the last three years. Tonight I noticed the site had been down due to a broken plugin for at least a few weeks. I have noticed several other similar problems from time to time over the last three years. I am going to be spending some time over the next few weeks to do a lot of clean-up, work on implementing a new theme, revisiting the plugins (I noticed a few months ago that several had implemented ads / cross site promotional network stuff we had no intention of putting on the site…) and making the site look like something useful and modern for our visitors.
A lot of people still use the site. We’re actually seeing more visitors now than when she was publishing the site regularly. MS is becoming a more well known and understood disease and there have been a huge number of treatment and research developments that we’d like to discuss.

Thanks for your patience and continued support. Preparations are underway to resume regular service.

Pursuing Education With MS

November 17, 2012 by Sara

For almost a week I have returned to the status of “college girl.” No, I have not been downing jello shots or going to keg parties. While I have known for most of my life that a college degree is necessary for most careers, until recently I did not have the opportunity to truly consider completing my degree. After my diagnosis I was certain that it would never happen – I could barely type, stay awake, or have coherent thoughts. Time has passed – I now find myself enrolled in college again. In hindsight I see signs that I already had Multiple Sclerosis in college, but certainly not as advanced as it now is. Pursuing education with MS is intimidating.

Career Versus Multiple Sclerosis And Disability

May 20, 2012 by Sara

Work can be stressful and tough without a disease like MS. What’s a person to do when confronting a challenging career and a challenging disease? Plenty of people (and celebrities) have flourished in their careers in spite of MS. What can you do to be one of those people? What are your options if you simply can’t work anymore? What do you need to know about Multiple Sclerosis and disability?

Last week I began a new position at the company where I’ve worked for over a decade. The coming months are certain to be incredibly stressful. The primary challenges I face on a daily basis in a technical office career are cognitive issues, speech issues, walking (even though it’s primarily short distances), and fatigue. I abstain from many medications because they cause too much lethargy for me to power through a work day while taking them. While these are not all of the challenges I face with Multiple Sclerosis, they are the symptoms that affect me most in my job.

Many times when I meet someone, they are surprised that I do still work. I often think about how I could spend the time I’m stressed and tired at work instead resting, doing yoga, swimming, anything to help myself physically and mentally. Then again, who doesn’t dream about being somewhere else when they’re busy on the job? Certainly doctors and hospitals seem to expect everyone to have open schedules ready to spend hours and days in their offices.