Ann Romney and husband Mitt

• Published December 18, 2011

  | FoxNews.com
    
  AP
  June 24: Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, greet supporters at a drive-in hamburger restaurant in Salt Lake City.

When Ann Romney was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, her first concern was whether she would be able to take care of her family. But husband Mitt Romney said his biggest concern was her survival.

“If you think about what makes a difference to you in your life, it’s people,” the Republican presidential candidate told “Fox News Sunday” in his first Sunday interview in more than two years. 

“I’m happy in life as long as I’ve got my soul mate with me,” he said.

But Romney said he’s actually an “emotional guy” with deep feelings about the country and his family. Those emotions were on high when the doctors told them in 1998 that Ann was suffering from MS.

“Probably the toughest time in my life was standing there with Ann as we hugged each other and the diagnosis came,” Romney said. “And I was afraid it was Lou Gehrig’s disease. As we came into the doctor’s office, the brochures on his table there were Lou Gehrig’s — ALS — and multiple sclerosis. And he did these neurological tests and then he and we could see that she had real balance problems. 

And she didn’t have feeling in places she should have feeling, and he stepped out of the room and we stood up and hugged each other,” he said.

Romney said that wife, whom he met when she was as sophomore and he was a senior in high school, had no energy, couldn’t climb the stairs in the house and couldn’t make dinner. They were trying to find solutions to make her day-to-day activities easier to manage, he said, but she was most concerned about not being able to take care of her family. 

“I said, look, I don’t care what the meals are like. You know, I like cold cereal and peanut butter sandwiches. We could do fine with that as long as we have each other,” Romney said.