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Brenda Halsey, 49, knew something was wrong when she started having vision problems in her left eye in November 2004. Those problems turned out to be symptoms of multiple sclerosis.
For years, MS only caused minor issues. But in the fall of 2013, the mother of four started to lose feeling and function from her belly button down due to a lesion on her spine. The lesion made it harder for her to walk.
“It was really scary,” she tells TODAY. To focus on keeping her legs strong, she started running, hoping to enter a 5K or 10K race in a few months.
But MS can affect your balance, and in 2014, Halsey fell in the basement of her Eldora, Iowa, home. Her fall broke a canning jar, and the shards severed her Achilles tendon. “That led to a downfall of many years,” she says. In a separate fall, she severed tendons in her other foot.
Over the next eight years, she needed 11 orthopedic surgeries — five to repair the tendons, plus knee surgery, two shoulder surgeries and three hip surgeries. She also had more MS flares.
“My MS made every recovery more difficult. It was like my muscles forgot what they were supposed to do. It felt like I had lost so much I would never be able to get back to who I was,” she says.
She had been active and fit when she was younger, but managing MS, recovering from surgeries and caring for her children made it hard to find time for herself. “Life gets in the way,” she says.
Her weight crept up to almost 250 pounds and was limiting her daily life. “I didn’t want to go out to eat with my friends because I always felt self-conscious. Unless I ordered a salad, I thought people would think, ‘Look what that overweight lady is eating.’ I didn’t want to fly on a plane because…
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