Writer, commentator and humorist Julie Danis is a Chicago-based strategic marketing professional, and a consumer insights lecturer at Northwestern University. She’s worked for Frito-Lay, Inc. and held senior level strategist positions at J. Walter Thompson/Chicago and Draft/Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agencies. An editor and contributor to The Works magazine, Danis wrote a column called “It’s a Living” featured in the Sunday Chicago Tribune, and has contributed workplace commentary to public radio’s Marketplace.

She speaks to various groups on the subject “How to Make Work Work for You.” For part one of the story, click here. My parents had seen neurologists. I knew the drill. Count backward from 100 by seven and answer the questions: Who is president of the United States? and Who was president before that? until you get to George Washington or can’t remember. I started cramming for the test: 100, 93, 86, 79. The written word cannot demonstrate how s-l-o-w-l-y I subtract by seven. Since I was still in denial over the recent presidential inauguration, I wanted to qualify my answer and say, “Bush is president but Gore was elected.”

The next day the newspapers carried articles on 1) the difficulty of getting second opinions from doctors because health care records are not electronic and patients have to chase down reports and x-rays, 2) advances made with stroke patients regaining their sight and 3) the increase in bankruptcies caused by medical bills. I vowed to pick up a copy of my brain scan and file it for easy reference and sharing and to review the terms of the long-term health care policy I had purchased a couple years before.

My mother never had vision problems as a result of her strokes, so I ignored that article. The written MRI report that I picked up at Levine’s office said, “Multiple sclerosis (MS) could be a possibility” for my type of lesions. MS. Dear Dr. Barry never mentioned MS. MS had never occurred to me. Wasn’t I too old to be presenting MS? For once being old could be on my side. My own personal diagnosis was that I had experienced TIA’s or mini-strokes. Surely that’s what caused my pre-wedding stumbling at the health club, I thought. I confronted the doctor with the fact that he never mentioned MS before. He didn’t want me to worry, he said. But now since that’s the only thing he didn’t mention I was worried. No, not just worried, was convinced I had MS. Then he said, “The spots on your brain are not the kind that would be left by a stroke.” Now, I was sure he was sure it was MS.

Read about Julie Danis' medical mystery and its resolution at Women's Voices For Change.