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Summary & Participants

Lisa Peck is a lawyer and professional bike racer. She is also a woman with MS who is on interferon therapy. Interferon therapy is a long-term commitment for many people with MS. And being on this therapy can mean that you still enjoy a full and active life. Learn from people with MS how to accommodate your disease and still live life full speed ahead.

Medically Reviewed On: July 21, 2009

Webcast Transcript

LISA PECK: When I was diagnosed, the first thing I told my doctor was, "Well, that's great. I'm not giving up the mountain biking. You figure out a way for this to happen." Which wasn't really fair to him, but I think that actually maintaining activity and maintaining the lifestyle, really focusing on the quality of life for yourself is the best thing you can do for yourself.

ANNOUNCER: Lisa Peck is a lawyer, a professional cyclist and a woman with MS. It was a frightening diagnosis for an athlete like Lisa, especially since years ago she had grown up with an aunt suffering from the same disease.

LISA PECK: She had a very serious form of it, and she was in a wheelchair. And that was my exposure as a young child and growing up to MS, that there wasn't a whole lot of progress, at least in that day and age, that could be done about it.

ANNOUNCER: Today, however, new medications called interferons have changed the outlook for some people with MS. People like Lisa and Faith Reilly, a nurse and mother.

FAITH REILLY: MS is not curable yet, though I have hopes. I always have hopes. But there are injectable therapies that can control the rate of disability as well as the frequency and severity of attacks that you have.

Interferon therapy for me has been a real godsend, because in the first year after my diagnosis, my MS was very active, very aggressive. I think I had five relapses in the one year's time.

Then I started interferon therapy and the first year on interferon I had two attacks, and since then maybe I've had a few. I have improved actually in my abilities as opposed to the first year I had my MS. So I'm very, very pleased.

ANNOUNCER: But for people with MS, coping with the disease means more than just dealing with symptoms.

LISA PECK: I think it's really important that people who are diagnosed with MS, that they do reach out to family, friends. Personally speaking, that was hard at first, because I'm a very independent, do-it-yourself kind of person. I didn't like the idea of having to ask for help.

But what I've learned is that MS doesn't affect just me. It actually does affect the people around me, and the more I can bring them in and actually allow them to help, the better off we all are, because then they don't feel so helpless and they don't feel like it's a battle for them.

ANNOUNCER: Sometimes it's important to reach out to the people who best understand: other people with MS.

FAITH REILLY: I think that it is really important to connect with the MS community, and rather than being afraid of it for what you might see, I think it can give you strength. I think what you have to keep in mind is that everybody's experience with MS is very unique. And what you see in one person sitting next to you is not necessarily what your future is going to be.

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