29/05/2026
Read the inspirational profile of Waterford World MS Day Ambassador Laura Barry in the Irish Examiner in the bio link and here https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/healthandwellbeing/arid-41852991.html
She first experienced symptoms at 17, when the right side of her face went numb. “It was just the right side…my right eye and I couldn’t feel the right side of my tongue.”
Doctors at University Hospital Waterford carried out tests to determine the cause of her symptoms. Several months later, she experienced another attack when she bent her neck and felt a shock down her spine. “They did an MRI, and that’s when the lesions showed up in my brain.”
At 18, she was diagnosed with MS and began treatment.
She knew little about the condition, and when she looked it up online was frightened at the possibility that she might need a wheelchair. “All these things pop up, and that scared the living daylights out of me,” she recalls.
MS is a neurological disease that affects the brain and spinal cord. “It’s caused by the immune system attacking the coating of the nerves, which leads to damage to the nerves themselves,” explains Dr Hugh Kearney, a consultant neurologist who leads the multiple sclerosis unit at St James’s Hospital, Dublin.
