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Summary & Participants

When Vince Macaluso was a med student he experienced visual disturbances that turned out to be multiple sclerosis. Now he is both a patient and the director of a multiple sclerosis clinic. Hear his story.

Medically Reviewed On: June 16, 2008

Webcast Transcript

VINCENT MACALUSO, MD: When I looked up and to the left, I saw two corners in the corner of my room, and I said, "That's not right."

ANNOUNCER: And what was happening to then 21-year-old Vincent Macaluso wasn't right. Within weeks he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a potentially devastating disease of the central nervous system.

VINCENT MACALUSO, MD: It was being stunned at first. And I remember going home, saying, "Look, I'm a smart person, I know what's going on in my body, I should be able to figure out how to cure this." And so, I just went down in my basement to think about it all and I did more and more research in it, after a while, I realized that I had to keep on going with my life and so I didn't really think a lot a lot about it.

ANNOUNCER: Initially Vince's symptoms were just bothersome. Sixteen years ago, no medications were available to directly treat MS, and Vince went without treatment.

VINCENT MACALUSO, MD: My exacerbations, when they initially started to come, happened about two to three times per year. I would get little bands of numb strips around the trunk of my body or little bit of loss of feeling maybe in one leg or something and I would just kind of shrug it off, because I didn't have to use the feeling on the side of my body.

ANNOUNCER: But the promising med student knew too much to totally ignore what the future might hold.

VINCENT MACALUSO, MD: I do remember calling up my father and mom and telling them, you know, "I just can't do this, I don't know what's going to happen. You know, I don't want to -- I can't be a doctor and not be able to walk or, if I'm blind, I can't be a functioning physician that way." And that's when my father intervened, which he has throughout my life in telling me to just stop wondering about the what-ifs; nobody has any control over the what-ifs.

ANNOUNCER: And Vince became a doctor. But as a resident, he started to have weakness in his legs. By then, medications called interferons had been developed to curb the progress of MS. Vince began, and continues to take, a weekly shot of interferon.

VINCENT MACALUSO, MD: I started medication in 1997, and since that time, I've really only had trouble with coordination in my left hand and one time with a bout of optic neuritis last year. And I took courses of steroids for my optic neuritis, and that totally went away.

ANNOUNCER: So MS became part of Vince Macaluso's life. Oddly, it had always been a part of the picture that Vince had for his future: To become a neurologist.

VINCENT MACALUSO, MD: I figure, if I can help other people explain this very difficult entity of the brain, if I can explain that to them, then I've helped open up a whole new world to other people as well.

ANNOUNCER: Eventually MS would also become Vince's specialty.

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