Florida woman, 70, refuses to surrender to MS after a 20-year fight
By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter
(HealthDay News) -- Seventy-year-old Judy Rappaport has been living with multiple sclerosis for two decades now.
To her, it's just an impediment. "I do practically what everyone else can," said Rappaport, who lives in Hallandale Beach , Fla. "I just do it a little slower."
She first began feeling symptoms when she was 52.
"All of a sudden I started to feel very tired all the time," Rappaport said. "I was walking in the street and could barely drag one foot at a time."
Rappaport went to her doctor after she woke up one morning numb from head to toe.
"It was a long journey," she said, recalling the five years it took doctors to diagnose her condition. "Unfortunately, every doctor thinks differently. At the beginning, my symptoms were not obvious enough."
A doctor in Florida finally happened upon multiple sclerosis as a potential cause of her symptoms. An MRI and spinal tap confirmed the diagnosis.
Rappaport remembers feeling relieved when the word came down.
"I had no idea what I had. I was scared to death," she said. "I said, 'I'm not going to die. I'm going to live.' Thank God, it could have been worse."
Rappaport now takes an injectable drug called Copaxone, which has kept her symptoms in remission for the most part.
"The one I take, I take it every day," she said. "It keeps me where I am. I've been taking it for eight years and it's kept me steady."
She remains numb in her hands and wobbly on her feet, but she walks well enough with a cane these days and her speech is fluid.
Rappaport is going on a cruise in March, and takes pride in always wearing makeup and good clothes. She also helps out as a counselor for other MS patients, urging them to live a normal life.
"People with disabilities don't have to be shoved to the wall," she said.
That said, multiple sclerosis is always a burden she must bear. "I get into the bathtub, I can hardly get up," she said. "If I fall, I have to crawl to a couch to push myself up."
But Rappaport refuses to bow to the disease.
"That's the trick, not to live in fear," she said. "We all have good days and we all have bad days, all of us.
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