From Diagnosis to Remission: My Full MS Story

Note: This is a personal story, not medical advice. I’m not a doctor. Read, relate, take what helps – but don’t be dumb about it.

Intro

Hey folks! My name’s Vlad. About five years ago, I got hit with a “fun” diagnosis I never really managed to come to terms with. At the time, I didn’t even know what this crap was – but I found out real quick.

Years of searching, self-experimentation, failure, depression, and feeling completely stuck eventually paid off. I found a way out. I figured out how to reach remission. And I’m ready to share it with you. For free. Because I know what it’s like when hope lights the way – even when the path feels impossible.

Want to find out too and change your life for the better?
Then let’s go.

Migration as foreplay

In my one mediocre life, I’ve already lived two completely different ones. The first began in Russia, which I left before it became trendy. The second – in Australia.

Can’t say Australia welcomed me with open arms. Migration is hard by any measure. And insanely stressful – which most likely played its part too. Bloody kangaroos didn’t help either.

Almost no one knew or knows about my diagnosis. And maybe they never will. I never felt the need to broadcast it or chase some vague idea of support. In fact, I deliberately avoided all those communities filled with endless whining like: “Oh no, I got all twisted up and now I shit myself, what do I do?” and that sort of thing. I had enough of my own misery. Still no idea how my wife put up with me. Hero of a woman.

All in all, stewing in that stuff wasn’t going to pull me out of chronic depression. At least not in my case.

Inception (But not directed by Christopher Nolan)

As a rule, shit only starts happening after the rooster’s already pecked you in the ass. Almost never beforehand.

My first warning sign came a year before the real fun began. They say vision problems are a classic departure point on the train you thought was headed to a tropical resort – but turns out you're actually headed straight into hell, because the conductor tossed your ass out for losing your damn ticket.

That’s how it started for me. Just this weird feeling like there was a speck of dust in my eye that wouldn’t go away no matter what. I figured I’d just spent too much time staring at a screen. Grabbed some random eyedrops – didn’t even need them, really. Couple of weeks later, it went away on its own. A year later, I’d find out – no, it didn’t.

Sometime after that, I managed to get a sports injury. It’s called coccydynia. In plain English – I broke my ass. Is that even possible, you ask? Oh yes. Want me to teach you how?

Time passed. The ass hurt. Sitting became painful. And then a new symptom showed up: my feet started going numb, slowly but steadily. I kept rubbing various ointments on my poor ass, thinking maybe a nerve got pinched or something. And finally, I had to do the one thing I feared most: go see a doctor.

The doctor heard me out and immediately tensed up. The symptoms didn’t make sense together. MRI of the butt showed nothing.

Modern medicine works like this: odds are, you’ll die before they figure out what’s actually wrong with you. Meanwhile, the numbness crept up to my lower abdomen. Around then, my doc casually muttered something about MS. I googled it for five seconds, panicked like hell, and closed the tab thinking, “No way – I’m healthy as a damn ox.” And young. That crap is for old losers, right? At the time, it never crossed my mind that the old loser… was me.

Still, no diagnosis yet. Just a hurting ass, numb limbs, and a big fat question mark. So we agreed to keep scanning upward along the spine, and just in case, peek inside my brain too.

I won’t bore you with the details, but by the time the MRI machine started recognizing me on sight, we finally found the culprit: a fat lesion chilling in my spine around the shoulder blades. And just like that – boom – my ass was healed. A miracle!

Technically, I diagnosed myself. By then I already knew what to look for, and I had the scan disc in my hands. The doctor just confirmed it. Game over, kitty. No more peeing standing up.

The 5 Stages of acceptance

Of course I went through them all. I’d only known about them in theory before – now it was time to get properly acquainted. All five, one after another, with no lube, stretched out over years. Occasionally rotating, just to keep things interesting. My ass started hurting again – but for a different reason this time.

It was the worst year I can remember. I rang in the New Year hooked up to an IV drip in the local hospital. How did I get there, you ask? Drove myself. No biggie.

They were pumping me full of prednisone. After reading every horror story Google had to offer, I figured I should probably try to stop this shitstorm while I could still walk myself to the toilet.

In hindsight, that was probably unnecessary. The nerves were already chewed up, I had no real understanding of the big picture, and panic was driving the show. It wasn’t exactly a time for deep reflection. I don’t remember getting much of a response from that therapy, and I handled it okay. But hey – if it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have that glorious photo of me celebrating New Year’s Eve… with an IV drip.

Yeah, they’ll ‘cure’ us all

I had an indecent number of questions. What the actual fuck? Why me? Why is everyone else fine and I’m the broken one? Why the hell did I even move countries?
If someone had started stacking those questions like bricks, they could’ve built a second Great Wall of China – this one circling the equator. Only this one would be called The Great Wall of Utter Bullshit™.

Depression hovered nearby, diligently sharpening something. Too bad it wasn’t a knife – it was a tooth. Would’ve been better to get stabbed quickly than gnawed on slowly.

The first thing I did, naturally, was look into what modern medicine had to offer.
Which, as it turned out, was basically nothing.

There was no magic pill to fix this crap once and for all. But oh, they had immunosuppressants. All kinds of lovely poisons – from interferons to monoclonal antibodies. My neurologist handed me a fat stack of glossy brochures advertising all sorts of "goodies" and said bluntly: it’s this, or the wheelchair. Fight all you want.

At that point, I didn’t yet understand how my body worked, but after 30+ years of living in it, I had a pretty good idea how so-called medicine did. I knew damn well that any of those therapies would likely kill me faster than MS itself. Well – not the therapy directly, of course. It’d be the shredded immune system and whatever infection came knocking next. Convenient, huh? You never blame the drug. “Patient died of infection. Unrelated.”
And don’t get me started on the side effects. The reviews online didn’t exactly paint a rosy picture – though sure, there were some positive ones too.

But how are we supposed to talk about “quality of life” when your morning starts with stabbing yourself with some sketchy substance, then spending the day hoping some rando with tuberculosis doesn’t sneeze on you? Or you sit through an IV session, after which you lie around for three months like a vegetable, praying you don’t die? Or maybe hoping you do, depending on how hard it hits. I don’t get it.

I’m not the kind of guy who folds just because he got handed some bullshit.
Swallowing handfuls of pills instead of breakfast, chopping off numb limbs, wrapping myself in IV drips and “hoping for the best” – that’s not me.

Even though I barely understood what the hell was happening inside my body, I’ve always hated handing over responsibility for my health to someone else. Hospitals and doctors are the last place I’ll go when I feel like crap. Well… except for emergencies.

At some point, I pulled myself together and started diving into everything even remotely related to MS. I roamed the internet like a bomb disposal tech, carefully poking at anything that caught my attention. I tore through forums, YouTube channels, and every source I could get my hands on that mentioned MS. And just reading what people wrote and what they discussed – made me want to hang myself.

I quickly started connecting the dots and taking action. Can’t say I found the answers… But I found the signposts. And no – they weren’t pointing straight into the collective ass of despair.

Brave new world of modern food

First to go under the knife was gluten. There were solid reasons to believe the gut had a direct line to autoimmune issues. Now? I’m convinced the problem runs way deeper than just gluten.

Can’t say it was easy. Devouring a croissant the size of a city bus for breakfast – thickly slathered with buttery cream, generously topped with raspberries, and washed down with coffee – was perfectly normal for me. I’m honestly afraid to guess how many calories that beast had, or what my body thought of it. After such a light, dainty breakfast (just one croissant, mind you!), I usually skipped lunch entirely and wandered around guilt-free until dinner.

I wasn’t exactly a McDonald’s regular, but my diet was far from stellar: processed crap, canned food, pizza. I mean, if nothing’s broken, why fix it?

But cutting out gluten was the first brick pulled from the foundation of my familiar world – and that world started crumbling fast. It would’ve been supremely stupid to keep ignoring all the other crap our caring capitalist overlords have shoved into modern food.

Truth is, if you’re trying to heal your gut and don’t have celiac disease, gluten isn’t even the first thing you should be worrying about.

That’s how I stumbled into the glorious world of food labels. A minefield. Let me tell you this straight: most of what’s sold in a typical supermarket isn’t even food. And it’s bad.
Preservatives, stabilizers, colorants… Even actual shit, compared to some of these ingredients, starts to seem like a thoughtful gift. Not very appetizing – but, honestly, less harmful.

That’s how the quest began – the hunt for something that could still be called “food.”
Raw. Brutal. My menu had to be overhauled completely. At cafés or restaurants, they could sneak in anything. Even a seemingly innocent sauce becomes a deadly gamble when you know your quality of life might hinge on it.

I don’t remember exactly when I ditched dairy. But trust me – cutting out dairy is way easier than cutting everything else. It was just another line item on the endless “nope” list.

Lifestyle

To really polish things off, I started popping probiotics and every supplement I could get my hands on – enzymes, vitamins, fiber. Healthy eating in full glory. If it had even a slight chance of helping, I took it.

And it didn’t take long to see results. After about two months, my gut started behaving. No more bloating or heaviness, the stomach stopped growling like a dying animal. Sleep got better. Energy went up. But…

It would've been awesome if it actually worked. MS kept chewing away at me from the inside. New lesions were popping up in my brain. New parts of my body kept going numb – my lower back, my spine. There was no light at the end of the tunnel, and it started to feel like everything I was doing meant absolutely nothing.

Sure, I flipped my whole life upside down – but it didn’t seem to be paying off. Depression had a blast poking me with a dull stick. It hurt. And it sucked. I’ve lost count of how many times I hit rock bottom. Looking back now, I think if it hadn’t been for the diet, I’d already be in a wheelchair. And fast.

So I kept searching. I went deep into all the protocols and diets I could find – the Embry diet, Swank, Wahls Protocol, keto, raw food, vegetarianism, veganism, breatharianism.
Some of it I tried, some I didn’t. I cut out meat and within two weeks I was climbing the walls from cortisol spikes. I stuffed myself with Omega-3s until they made me nauseous.
I chewed greens like some hopeless goat. Nothing.

At some point, the stuff online started repeating itself, so I turned to books. There weren’t that many. One that stuck with me was about autoimmune diseases and how to supposedly shut them down. It was called “Beat Autoimmune: The 6 Keys to Reverse Your Condition and Reclaim Your Health” by Palmer Kippola.

I got a few useful things out of it – especially around household chemicals, plastic, toxins, parabens, and all the invisible crap we live with every day. That part really made me rethink what I put on my skin, breathe in, or use to wash dishes. But when it came to MS specifically – yeah, it didn’t work. Everything was vague: stress less, sleep more, eat cleaner… and maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe that’s enough if your autoimmune stuff is still in the early stages. But if you’re already on fire – that won’t cut it.

Food Intolerance or allergy?

Changing my diet and lifestyle didn’t cure me – but it taught me how to listen to my body. And that, in turn, pointed me toward the next step.

I’d had allergies for as long as I could remember. Or at least, that’s what I thought. Doctors agreed. And the symptoms were hard to argue with: constant sleepiness, a stuffy nose every morning, and sometimes full-blown meltdowns. You’re practically drowning in your own snot, sneezing hard enough to stop a train. Basically a walking corpse, face stuffed with tissues. Sometimes even lying down wasn’t an option – you’d choke. I had to call in sick at work more than once and munch on antihistamines just to survive.

I always assumed it was pollen. Ragweed, to be specific. That was the case back in Russia. After moving, things eased up a bit – but the attacks didn’t disappear. They just showed up less often, but with the same flair.

At this point, though, I couldn’t just ignore it like I used to. I had a feeling the allergy and the MS might actually be connected. Spoiler: I was right. But the root cause turned out to be something deeper.

Clean eating didn’t solve my snot issues, though it did make things a bit more bearable.
There’s no ragweed pollen in Australia. But there’s plenty of food.

So I started a food diary, hoping to track down the culprit. Not exactly a thrilling hobby. Mostly pointless, to be honest. There was no clear pattern between what I ate and how I felt. The list looked completely random. I kept scanning it, hunting for common threads. Nothing. Just noise.

Eventually, after months of agony, I pieced together a suspect list that fit a familiar pattern: “Today sucks extra hard – what the hell did I eat this week?” Tomatoes.
Fresh tuna. Avocado. Certain nuts. A few other random bastards...

“Off the beach, no sunhat!” I’d mutter while throwing yet another vegetable off my plate.
I was turning into a paranoid wreck, terrified of eating anything that wasn’t rice. Tomatoes haunted me. Every meal became a fight between the will to eat and the urge to crawl under a blanket and sob at how useless I felt. MS just sat there, smirking. Depression gently stroked me with its bat full of nails. Comforting? Not exactly.

Right around the time I was considering sewing my mouth shut, I stumbled on the concept of food intolerance. Most people think it’s BS. IgE, Ig-whatever – all nonsense, right? But for me, it sounded like hope.

In Australia, you can’t just test your blood for everything you feel like. Not even if you’re paying. Not even if you’re paying a lot. But luck was on my side. ImuPro shipped your blood off to Germany, ran their tests, and sent back the results. About 300 common ingredients checked for intolerances.

I didn’t think twice. Gave them my blood, gave them 800 bucks, and two weeks later I had my personalized blacklist. Some of the items matched what I’d already figured out.
Others were surprising – even contradictory.

But I didn’t hesitate. Everything on that list was brutally cut from my diet. And that… was a win.

Twenty years of allergy, of constant meh... I still remember what the doctor said to me when I came in with my first chronic runny nose about 20 years ago: “It’s rhinitis. Doesn’t go away. Just take the pills. I do.” Well, guess what? It does go away.

Within a month, nearly all allergy symptoms vanished. I stopped waking up like a beaten horse begging for death before breakfast. More than that – I started waking up at 6am. refreshed and full of energy. Just think how many years I pissed away. How much I could’ve done – how much I could’ve achieved – if I’d had that kind of energy all along.
I even parted ways with eczema. We’d been together almost ten years.

I’d call it a miracle – but getting there took years of hard work. And the joy of that victory didn’t last long.

What dreams may come

Unfortunately, my diagnosis didn’t give a damn about my energy levels or what time I got up in the morning.

One day I woke up and couldn’t speak. My brain felt like it was stuck in a never-ending mushroom trip – and not the fun kind. I couldn’t think straight. I was dizzy, everything around me kept shifting and floating. Any thought I tried to form would freeze halfway through. I guess that’s what it feels like when your brain and body stop playing on the same team. Well, welcome aboard – I was now that guy. Especially when I tried to talk.
Game over.

At the time, I was alone. My wife was working on the mainland, in an office. To this day I’m not sure how I got through it. I still had to buy groceries. There was no one to call for help. Sometimes, when I felt just a little better, I’d rush out to grab food. Other times, I ordered delivery. But not everything worth eating could be delivered. Life had to go on. And I couldn’t accept that this was the end.

From the outside, I still looked like a functioning human. I wasn’t shitting myself. I could walk. I could still (somehow) drive. But I don’t think I was really present. Honestly, I’m sure of it.

I remember standing at the checkout. The cashier asked if I needed a bag – and I just couldn’t answer. I tried to recite my phone number – got through a few digits, then everything jammed in my head. Nothing came out.

Somewhere around day whatever of my trip, there was a knock on the door. I wasn’t expecting anyone. I opened it – and there she was. My wife. God, what a moment.

She had freaked out after we’d “talked” on the phone – or rather, after I mumbled something incomprehensible. The only thing she could do was drop everything, quit her job, and fly over. Which she did. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.

But I couldn’t just quit my job – we wouldn’t survive. Landing a job in a new country is already worth a damn medal. At the very least – you’ve got bills to pay. I took a few days off, but quitting wasn’t an option. Especially since she had just done exactly that.

About a week later, things started to ease up. Since I worked remotely, I managed to hide most of it. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I was afraid of getting fired.

English isn’t my strong suit. Not my native language. So no one seemed surprised when I suddenly started stammering during the occasional meeting. Or maybe they were just being polite.

Even saying one full sentence without awkward pauses became nearly impossible.

Glossy little booklets

Something had to be done – and I knew it. I couldn’t keep experimenting and hoping for the best. The reality was brutal: one or two more episodes like that, and I’d be permanently disabled. And disabled people don’t work.

But we needed money. And I really didn’t want to start shitting my pants. Even more than that, I didn’t want to burden my wife with taking care of a vegetable. But that’s exactly what she was bracing for.

At some point, any hope for a future just… vanished. It was like staring at a blank grey wall you couldn’t break through no matter how hard you tried. I became this hopeless lump of shit who, honestly, just wanted to die. I had these vivid mental images – me in a wheelchair, my wife rolling me out for some fresh air – and I’d just cry. That was it. The end.

At one point I even tried some seriously “alternative” stuff – like hypnosis. Surprisingly, it worked. Wiped out the depression for a few months. Maybe longer. But the core problem? Still there.

There was only one way out – immunosuppressive therapy. I hated the idea from every possible angle. But the alternative was worse. My neurologist handed me yet another pile of shiny brochures. Each one practically a novel. Glossy, cheerful, and full of empty promises – they depressed me just by existing.

I reviewed the whole “menu” again: What delights await? I scoured online reviews and finally settled on Mavenclad. Not the strongest option, but at least you didn’t have to inject or swallow something daily. Just two courses of five tiny pills – with a break of a couple years in between. The mechanism sounded promising: wipe out your immune system and reboot from scratch. Plus, it was fully covered by insurance. When I saw what it cost without insurance, I damn near passed out. Let’s just say: no way I could’ve paid for it on my own.

Despite my fears, the first course went down smooth. I babied myself and stayed home for a couple of months, trying not to catch anything. Only side effect? Two months of living in a mental fog. Not the worst price to pay for a shot at a new life.

The illusion of relief

From that point on, life started to stabilize. I wouldn’t say I was free – not even close.
I was still paranoid every morning, checking whether anything had fallen off. I stuck to my diet. I kept living the healthy lifestyle. Symptoms would flare up, then fade. Maybe by then I’d just gotten used to them. Sometimes new ones would show up, only to vanish later – faith in the pills and sheer self-discipline kept me from falling into complete despair.

I’ll admit, even after two years, I never truly felt like I was “okay.” I couldn’t relax into the idea that I was healthy, that life could just… move on. I was still a depressed mess, with a fried nervous system, recurring suicidal thoughts, and a future foggier than ever. Not at all the same person who once landed in Australia, full of plans. MS smirked quietly from the corner. Depression sat nearby, occasionally chucking bricks at me. Sometimes they hit. Sometimes they didn’t.

That’s how two years went by. The second round of Mavenclad didn’t go as smoothly as the first. The brain fog lasted longer and hit harder. There were a few side effects. But nothing catastrophic.

And at some point… I finally started to let go a little. Bit by bit, I began to come back.

The puzzle comes together

As a newly reborn health freak, I threw myself back into the game with fresh determination. There was no stopping me now. I kept stuffing myself with every “good thing” under the sun. Who knows – maybe one of them would turn me into a superhuman with the ability to move objects with my mind? Besides, I still had numb legs and other lovely leftovers to deal with.

Time to bring out the heavy artillery. I cooked veggie soups. Brewed homemade kombucha. Fermented my own yogurt with alternative milk. Made bone broth.
Supplements, vitamins, nootropics, superfoods, probiotics – with so many bacteria onboard I could probably digest a bag of nails and half a cast-iron pot. I swear, even astronauts don’t prep this hard. I’d drop one health-boosting miracle just to replace it with something even trendier. Healthier. Holier. The new-life plan was flawless. What could possibly go wrong? Well... pretty much everything.

Slowly but surely, I started to feel worse. Despite all the effort, allergy symptoms began creeping back. Mornings became harder. I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on. Was the broth not brothy enough? Did I not drink enough kombucha? I think you already know where this was headed. Relapse.

It wasn’t even the worst one – no dramatic explosions or fireworks. Just... my hands started giving up on me. One more than the other. The return of those goddamn crawling nerve-zaps. Weakening muscles. Fingers that didn’t want to bend properly. Holy crap... I’m not gonna be able to wipe my own ass – I thought.

The worst part wasn’t even physical. It was that, in just a few minutes, I mentally crashed all the way back to square one. Years of progress wiped clean. The therapy hadn’t helped – even though it had been less than six months since the last Mavenclad course. What now? Just a terrifying void. A black hole with no parachute and zero control. Plans, hopes, and future – all blown away in an instant. Depression ran in to hug me like an old friend. Of course, it brought its favorite spiked bat.

I had to find something – anything – to keep going. And maybe… just maybe… the Universe finally heard me. Because right then, a miracle happened.

The missing piece

One day, I heard a new word. A word that changed everything. Histamine intolerance.

That was the diagnosis a friend of mine got from a nutritionist he’d visited while trying to solve his allergy issues. She also gave him a list of foods to avoid – and supplements to take. Of course, I had to read everything she’d recommended. My intuition wasn’t just whispering anymore – it was screaming bloody murder, and there was no way to shut it up.

By the time I finished reading the document, everything clicked into place. The food list matched almost exactly with what I’d discovered in my own food diary – and with the results of my intolerance test. I remembered every study I’d ever come across. This was it – the missing piece I’d been searching for all these years.

I spent the next few days diving into what had somehow been slipping past me my entire life. How? Why? Why didn’t a single doctor, allergist, or medical protocol ever mention histamine? Not once. Not anywhere. No one even hinted. Questions I’ll probably never get answers to. But honestly – it doesn’t matter anymore. I finally got the answer that mattered most.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Finding the details turned out to be easier than boiling an egg. Histamine – where it is, how it works, what it does, what it breaks. I tore through every article I could find online.
Read every study I could access on PubMed. The puzzle was finally coming together – piece by piece.

I remembered every MS flare-up – and what had come before it. I saw every mistake I’d made with perfect clarity. I finally understood why yogurt wrecked me, why wine and beer made me sneeze, and why chocolate and coffee triggered a full-blown relapse.

My depression – having taken a proper kick in the ass – was now whimpering quietly in the corner. MS stopped smirking. Actually, it wasn’t smiling at all anymore.

I cracked my knuckles and stared at the bat I’d taken from depression. “Alright, let me show you how this is going to go now.”

And I did.

I built the new diet in a single day. That day deserved a damn bottle of champagne.
But… champagne wasn’t part of the plan anymore. Just a few months on the new diet gave me what I’d been chasing for years.

Reborn

My life belongs to me again. Uncertainty doesn’t scare me anymore. Now I choose what to do. Now I can laugh in the face of anyone who tells me I’ll end up in a wheelchair without immunosuppressants. You don’t get to scare me anymore.

I came back from a place many never return from. And I came back stronger. And I’m not stopping here. But from now on – it’s not just for me. It’s for others. For those who recognize themselves in what they’ve just read. For those still searching. For those who fall – and find the strength to get back up again.

If you’ve read this far, know this – you are strong. And you will make it. And I’ll share everything I’ve discovered with you. For free. Because I’ve been there. Because I once dreamed of finding all this at the very beginning of my journey.

"Happiness for everyone, for free.
And let no one leave unsatisfied!"

— Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, 1971

Next: The Theory behind It all