Finding the right MS medication changed Cherie Binns’ life. Now she helps others live better with MS.
By Brian P. Dunleavy
Last Updated: 7/12/2019
It took Cherie C. Binns, RN, 19 years of otherwise unexplained symptoms get a proper diagnosis of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS), and an additional 9 years for her and her doctors to find a treatment that helped reduce the frequency and severity of her relapses.
And because of that, the condition took from her two things in life she loved: her work as a nurse and her music. She was a guitarist, flutist, and vocalist who specialized in liturgical music.
Still, “I love life,” says the married mother of two adult children who lives in Rhode Island. “I love my family, and I love the thought of the adventure of life ahead. I feel that now I am physically able to do some of the things my husband and I didn’t do in our forties and fifties. It’s been quite a change.”
Binns, now in her mid-sixties, credits her family, her work, and her faith with helping her reverse what she describes as the “deconditioning that comes with having a chronic disease.”
The Long Journey to an MS Diagnosis
Binns’s journey to a multiple sclerosis diagnosis began with symptoms resembling those of optic neuritis in her left eye and periods of left-side weakness. She would experience these symptoms once or twice a year for days or even weeks at a time before she saw an ophthalmologist in 1994 who sent her to a neurologist who confirmed her MS. By then, she had lost much of the sight in her left eye.
“I kept being told my symptoms didn’t really make much sense, and much of that time I didn’t have health insurance, and so doctors were hesitant to perform tests we couldn’t afford,” she says. “It was very frustrating, because I knew my body, and I didn’t feel like I was being taken seriously.”
Even after learning for sure that RRMS was the cause of her symptoms, Binns and her care team struggled to find a treatment that worked for her.
As a result, in 1996, she was forced to stop working as a nurse because her symptoms made working with the patients in her care too difficult.
“I had experienced several falls while out in the field, at clients’ houses,” she recalls of her home care case-management position. “A lot of my clients lived in beachside cottages without insulation. It would be 80 degrees outside and 100 degrees inside, and I would literally fall out the door because I was overheated and overtired.”
It wasn’t until she was “scooter dependent,” she says, that she finally began a disease-modifying therapy for MS. This came about when she transferred her care from a local neurologist to an MS specialist.
