+
Sponsored

They met over a shared diagnosis. Their love shows what’s possible for people with multiple sclerosis.

“A diagnosis of MS or any other diagnosis doesn’t define us.”

They met over a shared diagnosis. Their love shows what’s possible for people with multiple sclerosis.

Jaime teaching Bruna to play the guitar.

True

In most ways, Jaime and Bruna are an average couple. They share a love of literature, writing and music. They enjoy spending time at the beach with their dog and 5-year-old son, Francisco. Bruna affectionately refers to Jaime as “Jota”—a nickname based on the letter J in Portuguese. They have a solid network of friends and family in their small, coastal Brazilian town.

But this husband and wife team also have something more unique in common—they both have multiple sclerosis.

Bruna and Jaime love spending time at the beach in their small Brazilian town.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disorder affecting more than 2.8 million people worldwide. With MS, the immune system attacks the central nervous system, primarily targeting myelin—a fatty substance that insulates nerves—which affects the way nerves conduct electrical impulses to and from the brain. Symptoms of MS can include blurred vision, weak limbs, tingling sensations, unsteadiness, memory problems and fatigue. It impacts more women than men and no one knows the exact cause.

Bruna was diagnosed with MS when she was only 14 years old after seeking medical attention for tingling in her arms.


“It was a little scary because my doctor didn’t say the name of the disease,” she says. “He wrote it on a piece of paper and passed it to my mom. It was very difficult, because I thought it must not be a good thing if he couldn’t speak it out loud.”

She looked up multiple sclerosis on the internet when she got home from that doctor’s appointment and came across a website with inaccurate information stating that people diagnosed with MS only have about 10 years to live.

“It was shocking,” she says. And it was wrong. Bruna is now 35 and living well with MS.

Jaime found out he had MS in 2012 at age 28, but instead of a shock, he says his diagnosis came as a relief. He’d been having trouble walking and running and experiencing weakness for a few years, so he was glad to finally have an explanation for what was happening with his body.

For both Bruna and Jaime, their diagnosis was their first contact with MS. “That was one of the reasons I started my blog,” says Bruna, “because I didn’t want anyone else to go through this situation.”

Jaime and Bruna actually met through Bruna’s blog. After he was diagnosed, Jaime began researching MS and came across posts Bruna had written about doing her doctoral studies while living with MS. Jaime was working on his master’s degree at the time and wanted to ask her questions about being in academia with a chronic disease. Soon, they were emailing every single day, sharing little details of their lives. Six months after their first email exchange, they finally met in person.

The years since have been filled with love, marriage, a child, mutual caregiving and advocacy for people with MS and other chronic diseases.

Despite the fact that we live in the information age, misconceptions about MS abound. In Brazil, the word “sclerosis” is incorrectly associated with dementia and old age. “People don’t understand how we both have ‘sclerosis’ and have a doctorate and have a child,” Bruna says. “They think that sclerosis is dementia.”

Having their son, Francisco, has prompted a lot of questions from people who don’t understand that disability doesn’t mean being completely limited in ability.

“When I was diagnosed, we believed—and science believed—that people with MS couldn’t have children, [that] it was not appropriate to have children with MS,” says Bruna. “But when we decided to have a kid, we were very passionate that we were capable of educating our child.”

“People don’t believe that we can be a mom and dad with chronic disease and disability,” she says. “But I think it’s difficult to be a mom and dad for everybody.”

Jaime with son Francisco.

Jaime says people will ask how they were able to conceive a child, assuming that his using a wheelchair meant that they were unable to have sex—one of the many erroneous assumptions about people with disabilities.

There’s a wide diversity in what MS looks like and what it means for a person’s abilities, and the spectrum is exemplified in Bruna and Jaime’s experiences.

Bruna has relapsing remitting MS (RRMS), which is the most common type of MS. (About 85% of people with MS are initially diagnosed with RRMS.) Though symptoms can come and go, for the most part, Bruna can live and function as most people without MS would.

Jaime, on the other hand, has primary progressive MS (PPMS), where individuals experience a steady worsening of symptoms from onset without periodic relapses and remissions. Jaime has progressively lost function since his diagnosis. Today he is quadriplegic and his ability to speak has been hampered. Bruna serves as Jaime’s primary caregiver, but they also get a lot of help from friends and family that live nearby.

Knowing how vital it is to have such support, Bruna and Jaime have worked hard to create a community for people with chronic disease. Bruna serves as vice president of an MS advocacy group called Amigos Múltiplos pela Esclerose—“Multiple Friends of Sclerosis”—which provides information and support for people with MS and their loved ones. She also works as general manager of Chronical Day by Day (CDD), a patient association that provides reliable, accurate information about health, access and quality of life for people with chronic diseases.

Bruna with son Francisco.

“We have to create some stories and narratives so that it’s not the end of life—it’s a different way of life,” Bruna says. “We can live in a good way, even if we have a disease like MS.”

Bruna shares that having MS herself has made her a more respectful caregiver for Jaime. She says Jaime acts as her caregiver as well—it just looks different. For instance, he’s been teaching her to play the guitar, even though he’s not able to play himself anymore. She pushes him to do the things he can still do. They both refuse to see themselves as victims.

Jaime (right) teaches Bruna (left) to play the guitar. Jaime taught guitar lessons prior to becoming quadriplegic.

Bruna says people often write to them after a diagnosis and ask if they can have a normal life, and they always say that it’s a process to learn about their new body, and everything will change, but life with MS can be good. “It can be better than it was,” she says.

The biggest thing Bruna and Jaime want people to know is that having MS doesn’t mean they can’t have a full life; it is simply a part of their life.

“A diagnosis of MS or any other diagnosis doesn’t define us,” says Bruna. “It’s part of who we became, but it’s not what we are.”

May 30 is World MS Day. To learn about how to get involved, visit https://worldmsday.org/.


MAT-GLB-2201776-v1.0-05/2022

This article was sponsored by Sanofi. Jaime and Bruna were compensated for their participation in the development of this article.

Sponsored

ACUVUE launches a new campaign to inspire Gen Z to put down their phones and follow their vision

What will you create on your social media break? Share it at #MyVisionMySight.

True

If you’ve always lived in a world with social media, it can be tough to truly understand how it affects your life. One of the best ways to grasp its impact is to take a break to see what life is like without being tethered to your phone and distracted by a constant stream of notifications.

Knowing when to disconnect is becoming increasingly important as younger people are becoming aware of the adverse effects screen time can have on their eyes. According to Eyesafe Nielsen, adults are now spending 13-plus hours a day on their digital devices, a 35% increase from 2019.1. Many of us now spend more time staring at screens on a given day than we do sleeping which can impact our eye health.

Normally, you blink around 15 times per minute, however, focusing your eyes on computer screens or other digital displays have been shown to reduce your blink rate by up to 60%.2 Reduced blinking can destabilize your eyes’ tear film, causing dry, tired eyes and blurred vision.3

Keep ReadingShow less

Karlie Smith shows the meal she's bringing to the restaurant for her son.

A mom who admitted she packs her 2-year-old a meal when they go out to dinner has started an interesting debate on TikTok about restaurant etiquette and how it applies to young children.

The video posted by Ohio mom, Karlie Smith (unbreakablemomma on TikTok), has received nearly 600,000 views and has over 1,850 comments.

“Call me cheap, call me whatever, but if we’re going out to a restaurant, I’m packing my kid a meal," Smith, 21, said in her post. "I do this for many reasons. On Friday nights, my family and I get together, and tonight, we’re getting food out. My son is not getting food out.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Pop Culture

Man rewatches shows from his childhood and his recaps of the bonkers storylines are priceless

Rob Anderson's hilarious recaps of shows like "Mighty Ducks," "Beethoven," and "7th Heaven" might make you wonder how they got made in the first place.

@hearthrobert/TikTok

These plots makes zero sense.

While there are no doubt some timeless classics from our childhood that remain every bit as amazing as we remember, many are straight-up cringey upon a later viewing. Really, it’s to be expected as societal viewpoints change…sort of a marker of how far we’ve collectively come.

And so, what do we do with these problematic pieces of old-school pop culture? Well, we can certainly update them to better reflect a more modern attitude, but that also comes with a set of potential problems. Or we could simply never watch them again. Certainly an option given all the content out there. But then we might miss an opportunity to better understand what seemed to work for the mainstream then, and why it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the third option—allow ourselves to be entertained by their cringiness.

That’s certainly the route taken by Rob Anderson. Over on TikTok, Anderson has taken ultra-popular movies and television shows from his childhood and given them hilarious recaps capturing how absurd some of the storylines are.
Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Homeless man catches family's two children and dogs dropped from burning apartment building

"He was right underneath and he was like 'Yes, throw your daughters out, I'm going to catch them, I'm going to get them.'"

Man catches entire family as they jump from burning building.

House fires are devastating for families. In a matter of minutes, you could lose all of your belongings and a place to live, or worse, you could lose loved ones. A family in Phoenix, Arizona, recently found themselves facing the reality of their own home in flames. Claudia Jimenez told CBS News that she woke up trapped in her burning apartment with her two daughters, with nothing to do but yell for help in the hopes that someone would hear her.

The mom's screams were answered by Joe Hollins, a homeless man who was camping nearby with his wife. Hollins didn't hesitate to try to find a way to help. With no way out and the fire department still nowhere on the scene, Jimenez had to trust the stranger who was standing below.

"He was right underneath and he was like 'Yes, throw your daughters out, I'm going to catch them, I'm going to get them,'" Jimenez told CBS.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Woman decides that she is the love of her life and marries herself at her retirement home

“I said, you know what, I’ve done everything else. Why not?”

77-year-old woman decides she's the love of her life and marries herself.

We joke about marrying ourselves or a platonic friend if some arbitrary amount of time has passed without a proposal from an imaginary suitor. And sure, some people do wind up marrying a friend in more of a business arrangement, but it's not very common that someone follows through with marrying themselves.

Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.

On a beautiful May day, friends and family gathered in the O’Bannon Terrace Retirement Community, where Fideli is a resident, to witness the ceremony.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

12-year-old Texas girl saves her family from carbon monoxide poisoning

She knew something was wrong with her mom and brother, which wound up saving her whole family.

Fort Worth 12-year-old helps save family from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Carbon monoxide is called a silent killer for a reason. Many people don't realize they're experiencing carbon monoxide poisoning before it's too late. The gas is colorless and odorless and tends to have a sedating effect that causes people to sleep through the fatal poisoning. Having carbon monoxide detectors is one of the most effective ways to identify the gas before it's too late to get out of the house, but not every home has one.

A little girl in Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a terrifying encounter with the deadly gas, but her quick actions saved her entire family. Jaziyah Parker is being held up as a hero after she realized something was wrong with her family members and called for help.

The girl called 911 after she noticed her mom pass out. On the call with the dispatcher, Jaziyah says she thinks her mother has died before explaining that there was something now wrong with her baby brother, who was just 5-months-old.

Keep ReadingShow less

Drew Barrymore speaks during the FLOWER Beauty launch at Westfield Parramatta on April 13, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.

Drew Barrymore, 48, has been in the public consciousness since she starred as Gertie in 1982’s mega-blockbuster, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. So, it makes sense that many people of a certain age feel as if they’ve grown up with her.

Barrymore has consistently starred in hit films and movies that are rewatchable cable-TV staples, such as “Charlie's Angels” (2000), “Never Been Kissed” (1999), “Scream” (1996), “The Wedding Singer” (1998), “50 First Dates” (2004) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).

Now, she’s an even more significant part of people’s lives as the host of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” which runs every weekday on CBS. So far, the show has been a big success, attracting an average of 1.21 million views per show, and ranks as the #4 talk show in syndication. It was recently renewed through the 2024 season.

Keep ReadingShow less