What happens when you’re diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at just 26 years old? Ms Warrior #45

[I wouldn’t even wish you’d understand. I just wish that God had a better plan.

I’m so confused. I need a redo. A redo.

There’s something that’s inside of me that’s begging and begging and pleading. I just want to feel free. I just want to feel lovely. I’m surrounded by love that’s in pain.

Can I wipe your tears away? Please don’t hurt me.

I hate that it’s for me. I hate that it’s for me.

Hi, welcome to the MS Michigan Man 64 podcast. My name is Brian. I am the MS Michigan Man 64.

In 1992, I was playing football for the University of Michigan in the Rose Bowl against Washington. Then, five years later, after graduating, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I’ve been living that life for the last 28 years.

I talk about my journey, as well as the journeys of other chronic disease warriors all over the world, just to try to help people understand what it’s like going through that diagnosis: the mental health part of it, the family part of it, the employment part of it.

Today, I am sitting down with an MSer I met on TikTok about a month ago. Lely is just unbelievable. She’s from the state of Alabama, and she was diagnosed with MS when she was only 26 years old. I was 27, and she’s been fighting that fight ever since.

She’s got so many incredible things to say about her journey, what it did to her, and how she keeps on fighting the fight. Please welcome to the podcast, Lely. How are you doing today, Lely?

Hey, Brian. I’m doing fine. Blessed. Happy to be here.

When I met you, Lely, in a live about a month or two ago, just listening to you talk, I loved everything that you’re about. You are a warrior. I know you’re a mom of six kids. God bless you. Your journey is just amazing.

In 2019, you’re 26 years old. I was 27 when I got my diagnosis. What was going on in your life when you had to go to a doctor to try to get your symptoms figured out, and then a doctor is telling you that you have MS?

Well, it’s crazy because, having MS, I didn’t even know what it was.

I went deaf in my left ear. Of course, I worked for the prison, so I was in the clinic. We were just self-diagnosing, trying to flush the ears, thinking it was sinuses and all this stuff.

I think I went deaf in about April. I remember because we had a class reunion, and when I walked past the DJ’s booth, the speaker was so loud, but I couldn’t hear it. I was like, “Yeah, something’s wrong,” because I kept falling—feeling like I was falling while I lay down and went to sleep.

Yeah.

So I said, “Let me just go to an ENT.”

I went to the ENT doctor. We did the test. Hearing completely gone. She put me on steroids right before my 26th birthday, and my hearing came back.

When my hearing came back, she was like, “Oh, I’m going to send you out for an MRI because I’m just so curious to know why, at 26 years old, you suddenly went deaf.”

Yeah. Right.

She sent me out for the MRI, and it came back. She sent it over to a neurologist. It looked abnormal. It had white matter, white spots.

I’m thinking, “Okay, well, let me Google white spots.” When I saw white spots on Google, I’m thinking, “Okay, that means I’m just getting wiser.” It said wisdom.

I got a call from a neurologist’s office in Jackson Hospital. I went there, and he was like, “Are you off balance? Do you still feel like you’re falling when you sit down?”

I said, “Yeah, when I’m lying down, I still feel like I’m falling. I’ve been off balance. My hearing came back, but my eyes are blurry, and I’m a little shaky.”

He had me walk in a straight line from him to the window, and I couldn’t keep it together. Mind you, I drove myself to the doctor’s appointment. My husband’s a truck driver.

Okay.

Whatever the man said, I didn’t hear anything. My husband was like, “Babe, what’s up?”

I said, “He said something about MS or something. I don’t know. Some word starts with an M. Some word starts with an S. I don’t know.”

But he said I’d be paralyzed in two years had I not gone and gotten some insight into what it was to start treatment.

Oh, wow.

When I got told that I had MS, I was pretty much the same way you were, Lely. I had heard of it, like multiple sclerosis, MD, MS, something like that.

Then, when I started figuring out exactly what MS was—it’s chronic, it’s never going away—I was scared. I’m like, “I don’t want to be in a wheelchair. I’m only 27 years old.”

You’re 26 years old. You’re working in a prison. I was actually working inside a prison, too. I know that feeling, that scared feeling.

Let me ask you this. Back when you got diagnosed—I know when I got diagnosed in ’97, they really didn’t address the mental part of it, the understanding part of it. When you went through that diagnosis in 2019, did they try to explain it to you? Did they sit you down? Did they address the mental part of it at all, the mental health part of it?

This is what they told me at the first appointment before the diagnosis. She said, “If this is what it is, they do have support groups.”

Okay.

They called me on Halloween of 2019 and said, “Well, yeah, we did the spinal tap. We got the spinal fluid back, and it’s positive for protein in your fluid. So, matching that with the MRI, you have multiple sclerosis.”

I said, “Okay, thank you.” She didn’t say anything else. I hung up the phone, and I looked at my children. I was like, “And we’re still going trick-or-treating.”

There you go. That’s an MSer’s attitude. “Okay, I just found out. Hey, we’re still going trick-or-treating. Got to get that done.”

I was the same. When I was trying to get my stuff figured out, I was driving to work with one eye shut because I couldn’t see. I was seeing double. So I didn’t see four lines, I would shut one eye and drive to work with one eye, because that’s what we do.

We’re still going to figure stuff out. They finally figured it out, and my eyes were back to normal. But initially, when you’re going through it, you’re scared, but you’re still going to do whatever you’re going to do. You’re going to go out trick-or-treating right after you get told you’ve got MS.

I didn’t even know what it was. I went blind on the interstate on the way to work. Lost my complete vision, and then it came back.

I’m just saying, “Father God, fix it.” When my eyesight came back, I’m sitting at the stoplight like this.

Yeah.

I’m just like, “I don’t know what that was. I do not know what that was, but God, I trust you.”

The way it came in—everybody else talks about a wrecking ball, like it wrecked everything. I didn’t even see it as that because it was kind of like, “I’ve been through worse.”

Yeah.

So MS is nothing. I mean, yeah.

I know we’ve talked, and we kind of correlate a lot of people who get diagnosed with childhood trauma. I lost my dad at 15 years old, and I know you went through a horrific childhood. You’ve been through a lot.

That diagnosis of MS, I was kind of the same way. I lost my dad at 15. I broke two vertebrae in my back at 20. If this is it, okay, MS is MS. It is what it is.

I think a lot of us are like that. We went through something earlier in life, and it prepared us for what we’re going to go through for the rest of our lives whenever we get diagnosed.

Yep. You have to heal because it can lay dormant. If it’s hereditary, it can lay dormant in your body until something triggers it.

I feel like a lot of things triggered it over the years. Like 2013, I was feeling my hands and feet going numb when I was pregnant with my third child, and I was 18 then.

In 2012, I had just gotten an apartment, and I was going to the store. This guy made a U-turn, and another car came and smashed him into me. That was my first car accident. That’s when my back spasms started.

I’ve got a very similar story that I talk about here and there on the podcast. You just reminded me of it, so I’ll say it again.

In 1992, I’m in the Rose Bowl, right? A year later, I’m done. I graduated in May. The following year, 1993, I was in a bad car accident. I was a passenger. My head went through the windshield, and I got taken to the ER.

They had to cut me out of the car and take me to the ER, and they ran an MRI. That’s the first time I ever had an MRI on my head. All the football I played, I had MRIs on my back and my knees, but never on my head.

So I have an MRI a year after I get off the football field. The doctor came in and said, “Hey, your head’s fine from the car accident as far as the concussion goes, but you might want to follow up with a neurologist because there are signs of MS.”

At 23, I ignored him because I’m sitting here going, “I don’t even know what MS is,” number one. And number two, I just got done playing football at Michigan. I’m this big, and I feel fine. I feel fine. I didn’t have symptoms.

So they were probably dormant when I was playing football at Michigan, and that accident still didn’t bring them out.

What brought them out when I was 26 was that I was getting ready to get married. It wasn’t traumatic, but it was just that stress. I was going through the stress of planning a wedding, and that’s what ignited my MS. That’s when I got it figured out a year later, at 27.

Yep. Yep.

I think with this MS thing, the reason I misprocessed it or didn’t get diagnosed—we could have, because I’d had migraines over all those years—but the reason I couldn’t process it was because, when I did get diagnosed, my mind was on the next big thing.

Yeah.

The next big thing. But I do know, with MS, when I say that MS was the key that unlocked my purpose, I also know, if you want to make God laugh, make your own plans.

Absolutely. When you’ve got a diagnosis like MS, you’ve got to make your own plan, Lely, because you’re going to have to change things.

When I first started this out, I had plans. I was working in the state government system. I wanted to go into the federal system. I wanted to do this. I wanted to do that.

I got my diagnosis, and that changed my plan. I’m like, “Okay, well, I’ve got a secure job with good benefits, so I’m just going to sit tight and ride this out because I’ve got a disease, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

You’re right. I rode it for 20 years, and then I had to change the plan again. “Okay, now I’ve lost my ability to work because of this disease. So what are you going to do?”

I spent two years in a really bad depression because of that, and it took me a long time to get myself out of there. But you’ve got to change your plans. Like you said, there’s no direct path with this disease. Things are going to come up, and you’re going to have to change things all the time, right?

Yep. Like you said, that mental part of it—I guess the mental part didn’t bother me so much at that age because I was still able to do stuff.

Then, when I got taken off work, it wasn’t like, “Oh, you can’t go back to work indefinitely.” The whole world had shut down, so I couldn’t do anything.

Yeah.

I was getting my unemployment up until it was time to go back to work. My doctor was like, “Oh, yeah, the world is opening up slowly, but you haven’t gotten treatment yet. Your immune system is still compromised. I still don’t want you out, so I’m just going to take you off work indefinitely.”

I don’t think anything mental started bothering me until the world opened back up over the last two or three years, because I also felt behind.

Everybody was doing their PPP loan scams. Everybody was getting their money the way they were getting their money. I’m just like, “Okay, well, I played with my little money from unemployment, and everybody was investing.”

The whole time, I’m looking at other people’s plates, not realizing my plate was full enough.

Yeah.

Not realizing my plate was full enough. So I was good. The world shut down, and I didn’t get treatment until [year unclear].

God, that’s crazy. All because of COVID. I know a lot of people who got diagnosed in that time period of COVID, and some of the stories I hear, it’s really disheartening that a lot of people had to go through that during that time period, Lely.

Yeah. It’s crazy because I think the reason I misprocessed it was because God didn’t want me to take that and use it as the only thing I had going on.

I can remember having spasms trying to put my clothes on, even trying to put my pants on. My oldest daughter, she’s 16 now. She’ll be 17 this year. I think she was like 11 or 12.

When I had to holler for her to come help me put my clothes on, I said, “Oh, no, Lord. This is it. I’m not doing this. I cannot allow my kids to see me like this.”

They’re used to seeing Mama on the go. Mama gets it. My husband’s the same way.

I guess he researched the disease. By the time he researched it, he was coming home saying, “They’re old enough. They can do it. They’re old enough to start washing clothes. They’re old enough to start loading the dishwasher.”

He just started telling me everything they needed to start doing. I’m just like, “But I want to spoil my kids.”

He was like, “No, I’m thinking about the longevity in this. You’re my wife.”

Then he just went to telling everybody, when they wanted me to do something, “No.”

So that was probably the only mental part, because I couldn’t move how I wanted to move. My husband was just like, “No, you’re my wife.”

Yeah.

But what are we going to do?

He’s protecting you, though, Lely. That’s the way the spouses of us, after we get diagnosed, kind of want to fix us. They want to make sure.

I think it’s an acceptance thing for them. They’ve got to go through their processing of the disease, too, because it’s a journey for everybody, not just us getting diagnosed—our spouses, our kids.

I know you said you had three kids when you got diagnosed. Now you have six, but how do you teach your—

I had four.

Oh, you had four at diagnosis. Okay.

Yes, I had four.

Your kids were young. I didn’t have kids when I got diagnosed. How did your young kids understand that Mom went deaf and has vision problems? How have you been teaching them?

I think they understand a lot more now because I’m not as worked up as I used to be.

I got diagnosed in 2019. My son, he’s nine, he was three.

Oh, okay. So he was a toddler. Okay.

Yeah. He was a toddler. He couldn’t even remember when my older kids were like, “Yeah, Mama was a dentist. She did this. She did that. Mama had a job.”

Oh, that’s—

He was shocked.

Yeah. I know we talked about this before we recorded. You used it as a blessing, a gift that took you out of the workforce, and you got to be a mom. I think that is awesome.

I think a lot of people should look at it that way, and I know it’s a hard thing to do because I had that identity, too. I had that identity of working in the prison system for 20 years. Then, when I lost that identity, my mental health spiraled.

I like the way you attacked it and said, “Hey, I’m going to be the best mom I can be.” I didn’t do it like that, but it was a process.

You learn that just because you lost your identity, there are other things out there to accomplish. Okay, I don’t have that 20-year career. That’s over with.

But that was 12 years ago, and all the stuff I’ve done since then—I got on TikTok. I started doing TikToks. I’m 56 years old. I had no interest in any kind of social media or TikTok stuff when I was 50, 52.

My daughter got me into it, and now it’s all about spreading awareness. Let’s talk about this disease. Let’s talk about it.

This disease is not a death sentence. You’ve got to make it the best you can make it. You’ve got to customize your journey and look at all the positives. I know there are a lot of negatives, but you can always find positives from this disease, and I know you have.

Yeah. I’ve dealt with a lot of negativity already over the years, so I definitely don’t want to live with it. I don’t want my kids growing up feeling like, “Well, Mama got sick, and she gave up, so if something happens to me, I’m going to give up.”

I really feel like, had I stopped in 2013 or 2012 when I first started having back spasms, when my hands first started going numb, I don’t think I would have ever gotten my GED, my associate degree, or gone to school, because I would have been worried about what my life would look like if I tried to do all this.

I’m glad I didn’t go.

Yeah.

I’m glad I continued to do everything I had to do. I’m glad I didn’t go to the doctor and let them tell me, “Oh, these migraines are what’s causing you this,” because I really would have had a problem.

I can’t get mad now because, at 26, I had done everything. I got the degrees.

Yeah.

I got the high school diploma. I got the career. I had the fortune. I had the marriage. I bought the house.

Yep.

We did all that.

Yep. And you did that with MS that probably just wasn’t being diagnosed.

Yeah.

I totally get it. MS will never be able to take that away from you, Lely. It’ll never, ever be able to take that away from you.

I tell people that all the time. I played in three Rose Bowls and a Gator Bowl, won four Big Ten championships, and got a scholarship to play football at the University of Michigan.

Screw MS. It doesn’t matter what it does. It’s never going to be able to take that away.

I’ve got two beautiful kids who are adults now, 27 and 24. Screw MS. My kids have grown up to be great human beings, and I’m proud of that. I did that with MS.

You’ve just got to find the positives that can still come out of this disease and enjoy them to the best of your ability.

You know, my favorite story in the Bible—like you said, enjoy it to the best of your ability—when I realized that the paralyzed man, the lame man at the water, Jesus walked up to him and asked him if he wanted to be healed, and he had all these excuses.

Jesus said, “No, I asked you, did you want to be healed?” Not that everybody’s running before you to get in the pool, doing all this. Don’t give me excuses. Do you want to be healed? Yes or no?

Jesus asked, “Do you want to live?”

I do.

Yep. Yep.

I do. What is it that I need to do in this season of my life since I’m taken off work? I can’t do this. I can’t go. I can’t be around anybody. I can’t get sick. I can’t do anything, quote-unquote, according to what they say. I can’t do what they said I needed to do.

Same question: Do you want to get well?

Okay, now you’re a housewife. You don’t have to do all that. Now you’re at home with your children, and you’re homeschooling. You don’t have to do all that.

They’re at an age now where they’re so self-sufficient that I don’t have to get up and cook dinner if I don’t want to, because I’ve taught them.

Right.

I asked Him when I first got taken off work, “Lord, what do I do now?”

He told me to bring Him the children. I brought Him the children every day, homeschooling them, of course, because the schools were closed. They were already at home.

My husband and I made the best of it. He would use the soundbar and ring a bell on his phone, and everybody would come out for lunch. Then everybody would go back in to do work.

We found the fun in it. I didn’t—I didn’t—I didn’t—I didn’t.

Then I realized how many MS patients I’ve met in the last three months who really gave up. Thank God I didn’t give up.

Yeah. I understand the giving-up part because a lot of people don’t have that support system. You’ve got an amazing support system. We talked about your husband and how awesome he is.

But we see people in the community when we’re on TikTok who don’t have that. That’s the part that tears my heart out, because there are young—hold on one second.

There are young moms out there who are just trying to make the best life for their daughter or their son, and they don’t have—

Yeah.

They just don’t have a lot of help, and they’re fighting this fight. Those are the ones my heart goes out to.

But they’re badasses. They just keep on fighting and fighting. It’s hard. It’s hard seeing it.

It is. It definitely is, especially when you start seeing MS in the physical, in the visible. They say it’s an invisible disease until you really know what they’re going through.

I lost so much weight. I went from 224, 225 to 65 pounds in less than 30 days. My siblings had a conversation with each other about, “If she dies, who’s going to get all the kids?”

I’m just like, “Y’all thought I would die? Y’all thought I was dying?”

See, that’s why I had to live more than anything, because the big sister they knew, who was the G, the handler, the strong one—they thought I was dying. Oh, no. Not me.

Yeah.

Not me.

That’s another frustrating thing I see, that a lot of people just don’t understand this disease. They’re afraid to talk to us about it.

Like I said earlier, I didn’t talk a lot about my MS for 26 years, but if anybody asked me a question, I would talk about it all day long. If anybody wanted to know, I would give them anything they wanted to know.

But that didn’t happen very often. I’ve had this disease 28 years, and not many people ask about it. They know I have it. I think they’re afraid, like, “Hey, that guy’s got MS. Don’t talk about it. Don’t talk about it.”

I wish people weren’t like that. We need to make this more mainstream. There are a lot of people diagnosed with this disease. You might be working with somebody who has this disease.

I had it for 20 years working in the prison. My first 10, a lot of people didn’t even know I had it because it’s invisible, like you said.

But once it starts developing into something visible, that’s when we start getting that label, and it’s frustrating.

Yeah. It’s definitely frustrating, and I don’t want any more labels. I don’t want any more labels. No, I’m cool. I’ve got MS. MS doesn’t have me. I don’t want any more labels.

No, I’m the same Brian.

Wife.

Yeah, I’m the same mom. I’m the same Brian who played at the University of Michigan in 1992. I’m the same guy. The only difference is I’ve had MS for 28 years.

Why can’t you treat me like the same person? We just want to be treated like a normal person. I think that’s all any of us are looking for, and for people to understand us.

Yeah. It’s crazy because I’ve been misunderstood my whole life.

Yeah.

I’ve been misunderstood my whole life. I think that’s just part of the disease. You’re going to be misunderstood anyway. The disease just made me know, “You’re set apart. If I’m going to give you MS, you’ve got to kick it. You’ve just got to kick its butt. You’ve got to kick it.”

Like I told you, being molested at 12 and all that stuff. A domestic violence relationship at 15. Married. Drama with in-laws at 18, 19, all the way up until maybe now. It’s gotten better.

But even back in 2023, I got punched in the head by my cousin, who wouldn’t stop bothering me.

I can’t let anything—I refuse to let anything, because I’ve seen worse besides MS. MS hasn’t done anything but make me feel like a princess. I can kick my feet up when I feel like it, and I’m going to say no when I want to say no.

I love it. I love that. I love that. That attitude is perfect, Lely. You’ve just got to figure it out and take it day by day.

Let me ask you this. What kind of DMTs do they have you on, and how are you doing on them?

I’m on Ocrevus. When I finally got my infusion, I got on Ocrevus. I’m on Ocrevus now. It’s been doing wonderfully since 2022, 2023. I’ve been doing well.

They had me on all those other things, baclofen, muscle relaxers, and all that stuff, but honestly, they don’t do anything that broccoli can’t do.

That’s a good point. I tried the baclofen. I said, “Nah, it doesn’t do enough for me.” I’ve tried gabapentin. I’m like, “It doesn’t do anything for me.”

The one thing that does do something for me is THC, cannabis. I love smoking flower. I love smoking vapes. I love doing gummies. It’s part of my routine now.

My doctor is aware of that. He approves of it. He’s like, “Brian, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”

It gets me through the day. It helps me with the pain. It helps me with the mental part of it, the relaxation part of it.

I’m an advocate for medical marijuana, smoking it or however you want to do it—edibles, whatever.

Yeah. Yep. But see, we’ve got to get out of people-pleasing. There’s nobody I’m trying to please but God.

If I can’t get myself on track to do His work and His will, like talking on this podcast, then I’m being disobedient to Him.

I’m going to let a disease and these man-made drugs—when He already told us, “What I have given you is good.”

Yeah.

He told me, “Don’t make that the first thing you talk about. Don’t make that the main thing. Make Me the main thing, but everything that I’ve made is good.”

Damn.

So when I hear people talking about their baclofen and their gabapentin—gabapentin turned me into a demon.

Yep.

Baclofen had me feeling like a zombie three days after taking the medicine. So I’m cool on that.

I can’t judge anybody because, at the end of the day, we’ve all got to do what we’ve got to do to survive and do the work and the will we’re here to do.

Yeah. You customize your own journey. I tell everybody, just because something works for me, it might not work for you. And just because something works for you, it might not work for me.

But the community we’re in, we get to bounce these ideas off each other. We’re like, “Hey, have you ever had this?”

“Yeah, I’ve had that.”

“What do you do for that?”

“I do this, and it helps a little bit.”

That’s the part. There are a lot of people who are scared of medical marijuana or doing something else. But they hear enough people who have done it and gotten benefits out of it. Maybe they try it. Maybe they like it.

You can always say, “No, it’s not for me.” But you’ve got to try to do what’s going to make you feel the best.

When I worked for the state of Ohio, I wasn’t smoking weed because I got drug-tested. After I got done working with the state of Ohio, I’m like, “Well, there’s nothing stopping me now, so game on.”

You adjust it.

Exactly.

You adjust it for what you need at that time, and you just roll with it. That’s the way I look at it.

That’s what I told you. You’ve just got to keep readjusting. You’re going to readjust at least 10 times a week before you figure out what you really want to do.

Oh, yeah.

That’s just life. Life is long. That’s why I don’t believe in “life is so short.” No, life is long as hell.

Yep. Yep. Hey, so let’s talk about—

You choose what you do with it.

Yep. Absolutely.

Let’s talk about the community we met in on TikTok and how important that is to us. I know you’re in Q’s live a lot. You’re friends with Ray Ray. You’re friends with a lot of people I’m friends with.

Talk a little bit about the TikTok community and the importance of that community. I know that isolation, when it comes to having MS or having a chronic disease—just the importance of that community we found, where we found each other.

Yeah. I love my community. What is it? Q, Living Life with MS—Living with MS is his social club.

Yep.

Even before the social club came into effect as a 501(c)(7), I just feel like this was all I needed. Out of everything in my life that I have, this was the only thing I was missing.

And Vocals, when he does the midnight vibing, the recording after dark, the midnight after dark, it’s like, “You know what? We really belong here.”

Yeah.

I’ve always felt out of place until I met everybody in this community.

The first live I got on was JJ and Eric. I heard a woman complaining and complaining and complaining, and she was giving this rebuttal.

I said, “Nuh-uh. You can’t keep complaining about something we’re helping you with.”

I said, “One thing about it, either you’re going to take this disease by the bootstraps and keep on kicking, or you’re going to sit there with your boots hanging off, crying and kicking and screaming.”

You choose what you want to do in this life, but tomorrow’s going to come regardless of whether you want it or not.

Exactly. The sun’s always going to come up. It doesn’t matter how bad today is. Tomorrow’s going to be another day, and you attack that day to the best of your ability, and you keep on pushing.

Every person you’ve mentioned, I’m friends with just about every one of them. Eric, man, awesome guy down in Texas.

That’s another thing I don’t think a lot of people understand. You’ve got him, and you’ve got the Swab over in the UK. MS affects your voice. It affects your vocal cords. It can take away your eyesight. It can take away your hearing, like you. People don’t understand that.

They see the legs go and people in wheelchairs. This disease is brutal. It can take your voice. It can take your sight. It can take whatever it wants to take that’s connected to a nerve. It’s up for grabs with this disease.

When you do anatomy in school, they teach you what the central nervous system is. So when you say central nervous system, that’s my whole body, right? That’s my whole being.

When I first met Q, I was like, “Well, I think I should start doing my Bible study on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

He was like, “You know what? God first. I think you should do that.”

When I started doing it, I wasn’t even nervous. It was like, “Okay, well, y’all, welcome in.” I get to be myself, and I don’t have to water down who I am, how I’m supposed to be, or how I present.

Everybody’s not going to hear it the way preachers, ministers, and advocates put it. There’s always a way. That’s why I always say “the Lely way,” because my way, you’re going to get it the best. You’re going to get it the raw way.

Whether you’re pitying yourself, having a pity party, wanting somebody to give you a sob story—you can have all that. I’m not with that. I’m for getting it. We’ve got to get this done.

Like I said, I know what I’ve been through.

Yep.

I know what I’ve been through. So with this platform together, all of us, including you, Brian, you’re doing exactly what God wants you to do.

Whether you think it’s God or not, you’re doing what He wants you to do because you’re not stressed.

Yep.

You’re so at peace. I tell people, if it has to be forced, pulled, or pushed, it’s not God.

Yep. We’re flowing. We’re doing our thing.

I look at this—I was given a gift back when I was at Michigan and playing. My degree was in communications, broadcasting, and television. That was my degree. That was my gift from God back then when I was 22 years old.

I never used that gift until now. Now I realize that God gave me this gift of talking to people.

I love being on camera. I love being in front of people. Why not? Let’s do it.

I went outside the box a few years ago, and look at me now. I’m meeting you. I’m meeting Q. I’m meeting Millie. I’m meeting some incredible men and women who have this disease, and they’re not letting this disease slow them down.

They’re doing their thing. They’re figuring it out, and they’re changing things.

I know people who have gotten into art for the first time in their lives. They always had that little passion, but they never dove into it. Now they’ve got MS, and they dive into their art, and the stuff they’re creating is unbelievable.

I see that all the time in this community.

That’s crazy. That’s wild. That’s the best part about it.

You want to know what else is crazy? You said you went to college with a major in communications, and you love doing video recording.

My dad went to college for communications as well. Growing up, it’s so crazy because he’s from Nigeria, so he wanted to showcase everything, everything to send back home to his parents.

We actually had VHS tapes of all of us growing up, me and my siblings. I was always on there talking.

That’s awesome.

All of them, talking.

That’s awesome.

Look at me now. I’m a big girl now.

I know, right? Man, that is so awesome, Lely.

Hey, Lely, I’ve had so much fun talking to you. I know I’m going to see you on lives over and over again, and I know I’m probably going to have you on to do another episode because I’ve really had a lot of fun talking to you and enjoying your journey and how you keep on fighting.

If there’s anything you want to say to anybody who might be new in this journey, or they’ve got young kids like you and they have a career, what would your message be to them? Just to keep on fighting this fight, that life isn’t over, and you’re going to figure this out.

Reset as many times as you have to. Reset as many times as you need to.

Don’t listen to what you hear other people talking about because everybody’s life, everybody’s journey, everybody’s sickness is different.

I’ve met people with multiple sclerosis who are in wheelchairs. I’ve met people with lupus in wheelchairs. We’re all fighting a fight to do something else with our story.

We’re not here just to live and die and pay bills. So you’ve got this. This isn’t anything.

You fall—what did they say when you fell off your bike? Get up and keep going.

I love it.

MS is just the bruise on your brain. Get up and keep going.

Keep on going. Yeah, we’re going to figure it out. MSers figure it out. I say that all the time.

Lely, I absolutely want to thank you so much for joining me today to share your journey.

Please hit the subscribe button if you like what you’re listening to. If you like hearing Lely and me talking to each other, give me a thumbs-up and share it out.

We want to be understood, and the best way to be understood is to listen to us talk.

Until the next episode, this is the MS Michigan Man 64. I am out.

If you like this kind of content, please like, share, follow, and subscribe. And as always, go blue!]