It is 37 years ago for me but I remember quite well.

It was in the early 1970's when sophisticated diagnostic techniques didn't exist.

Numbness wasn't my first experience but so often symptoms come in clusters and with me a few things happen in tandom.

My first MS episode involved problems using my right hand. That lasted a week or so then more or less went away. I was referred to an old neurologist who made no diagnosis.

Then within a month I woke up to numbness from the bottom of my rib cage down. It was quite mild at first but got worse, until if felt as though the whole of my lower body was encased in plaster. That lasted a couple of months and then slowly disappeared. I didn't return to the neurologist.

Strangely, I knew it was MS. I was just 22/23 at the time. Another woman at work a few months earlier had what was called then 'disseminated sclerosis' and I knew intuitively that I had the same.

I had an eight year remission, however, and the MS was definitively diagnosed when I had two attacks of optic neuritis in 6 months.