Life-saving MS treatment for Tawny

My name is Alba and I am coordinating this fundraising campaign Life-saving MS treatment for Tawny for a very dear and special friend Tawny Thomson-Bush. Learn her story in her own words in the video and words
below.

Hello. My name is Tawny. Though you may not know me, you have seen me in one of the million or two people who have Multiple Sclerosis, or MS worldwide. It is estimated that about 1 million people have MS in the US alone. I am one of them.

Almost everyone knows someone who has some form of MS.

I may not be unique to you, but I am to those who know and love me.

MS is an autoimmune disease that wreaks havoc on your body's immune system. Your body basically tries to heal itself from what is thought to be an encounter with the common cold virus. For me, I encountered a mono-like virus in Jr. High School, well before I even had my first kiss. Many MS patients have also encountered the Epstein Barr virus like me. A cold virus!

Somehow, that mixed with other environmental conditions like living pretty far north of the equator and having a vitamin D deficiency, having a stressful life, having just the right genes that caused my body tried to heal itself. Something went wrong, and my body's immune system tried too hard and ended up destroying the myelin that covers nerves. Well, I am not a doctor with a Nobel prize, but this is my best guesstimate for how it all started.

Anyway, I started out my adult life married at 18, a mother by 20, and a divorced mother of a 3-year-old at 23. Like many young people, I worked and went to school to make a better life for my son and me. It was hard, I was poor, but I did not give up. I finally had a promising career only to have the MS symptoms that I'd been having for years to be diagnosed as MS. And I still worked as I secretly injected interferon for 14 years. My disease progressed, and I was finally disabled some years later.

During recent years, I was hospitalized several times, once for sepsis that almost killed me. I have changed acute medications many times, all to slow the progression of this time bomb of a disease. Two summers ago, I even had Cyberknife brain surgery to help remedy a nerve causing me trigeminal neuralgia due to the MS progressing. Every year brings panic that my new symptoms will further eat away at my ability to walk, talk, and live. MS is a progressive disease that gets worse and worse. I use a cane and a rollator now; the next step is a wheelchair, and then being bedridden.

I try to be happy and always focus on what I DO have rather than what I do not. I am a "half full" kind of person anyway, but now I am a person who is just thankful to have a glass at all!

I know lots of people have fundraisers for nearly everything these days. It is my hope you don't overlook my petition to you today. I must raise $60,000 for chemo and a stem cell transplant using my own body's stem cells. I will be in treatment for 28 days in hopes that I might completely STOP the MS that grips my body. This procedure is called HSCT or Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant. It is the same treatment actress Selma Blair has used for her MS. HSCT Completely kills my natural immune system then uses my own stem cells to reboot my flawed immunity.

Incredibly, these things can be done to help people like me, at a cost, of course. There is a slight risk of death, but I would much prefer it to the risk of wasting away from the ravages of MS.

If you can offer any assistance, I could really use it. If you cannot, please forward my plea to others. Thank you.