and following on from my 'hug' question, tell me about your experiences with the heat.
how does it affect you? how do you know it's the heat aggravating your ms? what happens to you?

again, i'm new to this, so i apologise for the repetition in questions.
We had our first 30 degree'er yesterday and i felt like poo. all in the mind?? who knows.

But will it get worse in the summer? we usually reach 40's....

what's going to happen to me?????

Hello, pud's friend.

Heat effects each of us differrentlt and some don't even have a problem with heat.

For me:

Think of a flower that has been without water in heat, it droops, wilts but when you give it water it perks back up.

That's me. Put me in the heat and I wilt (no energy), I feel weak and my legs feel like lead. If I spend some time in air condtioning I start to feel better.

The problem I have is heat will trigger my exacerbations. I hate July and August. If I make it past August without an exacerbation I have a good chance of being fine, at least until next year when it starts all over again.

I am also cold sensitive The cold causes more pain and stiffness in my legs - I hate temp extremes.

I have lesions on my optic nerves, and suffer from the heat visually as well. I have Uhthoffs syndrome (sp?) and when I over heat my vision goes wonky. i dont go blind per se, but I get fuzzy vision. Lets say I was out for a nice brisk walk, and got over heated, it would be like someone smeared vaseline on my glasses. I could tell you that a large golden colored car past me, but couldnt tell you what make it was, nor the license plate of it. I can make out the blur of where the road is, and where the grass is, but cant see sticks or trash that I am about to step on, unless its brightly colored. I am told this is rare for MS patients, and some have it with or without lesions.

Normal everyday heat makes me feel like I have run a marathon. my body wont co operate. I go into slow motion and feel like I gain 100 pounds. I feel wrung out, and if I dont cool off I can get confused, and disoriented.

I will say that being on copaxone (for me) makes these sx worse. When I was off copaxone, I tolerated heat a bit better, and had more energy. I will admit it was beautiful weather during my 2 weeks off, so that is hard to judge.

I find if I push myself past the point of comfort, I can end up with diarrhea, tummy cramps, confusion, severe exhaustion, my legs turn to jelly and feel like they wont hold me up, and I will spend the next 3 days recovering from the event. It will be like I am recovering from a marathon.

btw the humidity is what really throws me. I can deal with some heat, but make it muggy, and I go down like a sack of potatoes.

It varies for each person. Some folks just get wobbly, and tired. Others get the full boat of sx like me.

Funny thing up until this summer the heat has never bothered me... Let me get cold and it will take me 2 days to warm up. But just this year I've noticed that any energy spent in the heat will result in a few days of dizzy spells and the overall feeling of being drained!

There are 3 papers out there (not free unfortunately) by Russell Johnson, a meteorologist with MS who made the connection between dew point temperature and MS symptoms some time ago has written a number of papers on the subject. Unfortunately you can't get at the papers for free on the internet. But, in a nutshell, he lays out a framework that shows that humidity is the oft overlooked variable, it's not just about heat. Ken

Makes perfect sense to me that a high dewpoint would make MS sx worse..After all, when the humidity's up, your body can't cool itself off. Heat index is higher than air temp.

my heat sx aren't as bad as some. my vision gets a little fuzzy, i get mild cog fog, and if really over heated i tend to be clumbsy. Last week it was hot and humid all week and much of my work is outdoors, by the time the week was over I was completely wiped out and it took 2 days to recover.

That would explain why I can do so well in every type of heat imaginable, except hot and humid heat.

Hot + Humid = Ragdoll

I get really weak on hot and humid days. It's like someone took my bones and replaced them with rubber bands.

Russell Johnson did a chart of sorts that compares humdity and temperature in one of the papers I saw a long time ago. The bottomline was that heat is a key variable as most suspect, but changes in humidity had a greater impact. But, it's really a sliding scale for both of them with humidity being the more sensitive one. Ken