Welcome to Living Well with MS Coffee Break #21, where we are pleased to welcome Julie Pankhurst as our guest!

 

Our Coffee Break series is your chance to get to know members of our diverse OMS community. In each episode, you’ll join Geoff Allix for an intimate chat with a different member of our global community. Our guests will share their personal stories and talk about their challenges and victories, large and small. We hope you find common cause and a source of inspiration from the stories of these very special people.

 

As always, your comments and suggestions are always welcome by emailing podcast@overcomingms.org. We hope you enjoy this episode’s conversation with Julie, coming to you straight from Surrey, England.

 

Julie’s Professional Bio (in her own words):

 

I trained to be a software engineer straight out of school in the mid 80s. There weren’t many female engineers at that time, which appealed to me a lot as at age 18, I wanted to prove that I was just as good as any man out there! This perhaps stemmed from the friendly competitive nature between my brother and me (a friendly rivalry that still exists today!)

 

In 1999, while pregnant with my first of two daughters, I used a website called phonenumbers.net and literally over a weekend I was able to track down my grandfather, who had left his wife and child (my father) in the 1940s to set up home in Denmark.  This was the first time that I recognized the enormous power of the Internet. In the 1990s it seemed that everyone was looking for the next big Dotcom idea. While many people were putting their shop online, I sought ideas that could appeal to an even wider range of people. This was when I had the thought that everyone in the UK went to school and might like to know what had happened to their old primary school friends, just like I did in the case of a friend who had left London to live in Edinburgh when she was 10. This was the simple idea behind FriendsReunited, which was set up in 2000: a UK website through which people could easily track down their old school chums by searching for the year group within their school. 

 

My husband and I sold the company in 2005 and since then have taken great delight in being parents, philanthropists, and travelling.

 

Julie’s MS Bio (in her own words):

 

Over the last seven years or so I’d seen my GP once a year with issues that were niggling me: memory problems, pins and needles in my feet, incontinence, balance, and walking issues, etc. These were all dismissed as nothing significant. My memory problems concerned me greatly but when I suggested that I wanted to pay for a full health check I was told not to waste my money. A year later, on Valentine’s Day 2019, my husband and I each had a full health checkup which included brain MRIs. The doctor first thought my symptoms were due to being peri-menopausal until she saw the results from the brain MRI. This is when it was pointed out to me that I had lesions in my brain which could be MS.

I visited a neurologist who diagnosed me with primary progressive MS. My world fell apart. All the dreams that I had to travel the world once our daughters left school disappeared. In June 2019 a friend mentioned the OMS program. On researching further, I learned that there was going to be an OMS retreat the next month. I signed up straight away. I did not know anyone with MS and went to this retreat feeling very alone and scared of seeing how my future was going to be. I left the retreat having made many supportive friends and incredibly positive about my future. OMS gave me the tools to be proactive daily rather than simply seeing a neurologist just once a year.

 

In November 2019, an agonizingly long time after my first diagnosis, I got to meet a NHS neurologist who almost immediately said that she did not believe I had primary progres

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Erscheinungs­datum: 30.8.2021, 13:00:00