Like MANY with Multiple Sclerosis, Wendy Booker shows life can be lived with MS

Courtesy of Wendy BookerWendy Booker plans to temporarily move to Alaska later this year and train as a musher for the 2013 Iditarod.

When Wendy Booker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in June 1998, she instantly envisioned spending the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Booker’s knowledge of the disease was limited to a few of her parents’ friends who became debilitated after their diagnosis. But that was a different generation.

Booker, now 57, still believes that panic, ranging from immobilization to much worse, sets in for most newly diagnosed MS patients and their families.

“My then-8-year-old son asked if I was going to die, which is actually the first thing you think of if you don’t know anything about the disease,” Booker said.

Luckily, she already had embarked on heavy research before relaying the news to her 8-year-old and other two sons, 15 and 19 at the time. She transferred to a world-class neurologist, Dr. Howard Weiner, at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and started taking Copaxone, a widely used disease-modifying therapy for people with MS. She was well-equipped to ease her kids’ fears but needed an outlet to calm her own. That was when she transformed herself into an extreme athlete and adventurer.

“I have this diagnosis, so what am I going to do with it?” Booker recalled. “I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to do something out of character, something I never entertained before.'”

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