In August 2021, bordering on a total physical collapse, I forced my way into an inpatient bed at the Brain Institute. I underwent a fresh battery of advanced diagnostics, and then I took my charts to a legendary specialist in St. Petersburg—Dr. Lidia Nikolaevna Prakhova, a Doctor of Sciences with nearly three decades of neurological tenure. She reviewed my files, looked up, and delivered a calm, shattering verdict: I did not have multiple sclerosis, and I never did. Let me type that again so there is zero ambiguity: she flatly stated that I did not have the disease that a small army of medical experts had been aggressively medicating me for for eight and a half years. According to Dr. Prakhova, I had suffered a single, massive attack of ADEM (Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis)—hardly a walk in the park, but crucially, a one-time event, not a lifelong sentence. The condition, she explained, was notoriously erratic—it shows up, wreaks havoc, and vanishes entirely on its own schedule. All those years of interferons and copaxones had been completely useless.
To put this in perspective: over those eight years, my nonexistent multiple sclerosis was managed by some of the most famous, highly decorated neurologists in the country—names like Boyko, Bisaga, Khachanova, Davydovskaya, Ovcharov, and Pozhidaeva. I had sat in consulting rooms at the Brain Institute and the Institute of Neurology. Every single one of them was absolutely certain I had MS, and every single one of them was eager to pump me full of interferons and copaxones. In fact, they almost certainly convinced themselves that their prescriptions were the exact reason my disease wasn't progressing. To be completely honest, I believed it too, even if it feels surreal to look back on now.
Fortunately, my story has a genuine Hollywood happy ending. My health has rebounded dramatically, I fell deeply in love, and I got married. I have a gorgeous family, we are financially secure, and we spend our time traveling and living by the ocean for months on end. My doctors noted that a coastal, warm climate works wonders for my residual symptoms—and I am more than happy to oblige. We are happy, we live a lush, full life, and I never have to track the progression of my multiple sclerosis ever again.
What should we take away from all this? The list of conclusions is so long that I barely know where to begin. And is a book written by someone else even the right venue for my personal epilogue? Actually, it's perfect—this is my story, and nobody can distill its lessons better than me.
Should I have questioned the diagnosis fourteen years ago, realizing that while I felt young, I was technically way outside the prime demographic for an MS debut? Yes, I see that clearly now. Should I have blindly trusted a row of diplomas simply because they wore white coats and muttered the Hippocratic Oath? Absolutely not—that was a catastrophic mistake. Did I ever suspect, deep down, that I didn't have sclerosis at all, and that my doctors secretly suspected it too, finding it much easier to "manage" a perfectly healthy person with their interferons? More times than I have fingers and toes to count.
Do I mourn the lost years, the shattered nerves, the wasted money, and the unprompted damage to my body? Of course I do, but the past is a locked vault; nobody has ever managed to reverse time. Still, they say all's well that ends well, and my ending is magnificent—I have been living beautifully, entirely free of MS and pharmaceutical chemicals, for over five solid years. Consider this chilling detail: if I hadn't pushed like a woman possessed to get an honest, independent diagnostic review, I would have subjected my body to roughly 1,800 more daily injections of glatiramer acetate. Those needles would have drained about 1.5 million rubles from the public purse—not a single kopeck out of my pocket, because your taxes would have footed the bill. I refuse to even visualize what 1,800 more hardened, subcutaneous lumps would have done to my skin.
What truly terrifies me is that this system isn't correcting itself; it's scaling up. In 2017, the grand architect of MS diagnostics, McDonald, updated the criteria to state that an absence of active CNS inflammation is no longer a valid reason to strip away an established diagnosis. Ironically, that specific metric was a huge factor in clearing my name. They are now handing out MS tags faster and easier than ever, treating the diagnosis like a default label. No wonder the global patient population is exploding—I read a report recently claiming the numbers have tripled over the last thirty years.
It turns out, if you think about it, that they are treating increasingly more healthy people like me for sclerosis, and therefore their medicines show increasingly better results. My doctors told me that I, roughly speaking, should be grateful only to interferons and copaxones for the fact that I wasn't in a wheelchair yet, and I believed them. Believed them for 8 years! They were serious doctors, after all, the best specialists in the country; young ones study from their textbooks! To be honest, it’s better not to think about all of this extra times—it makes you terribly disgusted, and the conclusions in my head right now are such that my hand doesn't turn to type them, and the publishing house won't allow it. Perhaps I will keep my emotions to myself, and as a conclusion, I’d better write this, and I will even ask to highlight it in bold: burning lesions on an MRI are not always multiple sclerosis..
Marina's VK page is vk.com, email is solov2008@bk.ru. If you have any doubts that what is written above really happened, please contact Marina.
Chapter 1. Blood, Lymphocytes, and Multiple Sclerosis
«The blood is the life»
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Blood
An adult human carries about 5 liters of blood, and those 5 liters pack roughly 25 trillion cells. Try to visualize that number—it’s 25 thousand billion. Yet, because liquid plasma makes up 55% of your blood, all 25 trillion cells could fit inside a legendary 2.25-liter bottle of "Ochakovo" beer. If you filled that same bottle with the finest sand from the Maldives, it would hold about 220 to 230 million white grains. This means a single red blood cell—the most common cell in your body—is about 100,000 times smaller in volume than a grain of Maldivian sand.
In classical hematology, blood cells are split into three core categories: erythrocytes, platelets, and leukocytes. Erythrocytes haul oxygen across the body; platelets (which aren’t actually cells but "post-cellular structures") manage clotting; and leukocytes form the baseline of our immune system. This classification system evolved piece by step as new blood cells were discovered, finally freezing into its current form toward the late 19th century.
Every single blood cell is the byproduct of differentiation—essentially, a transformation—stemming from the exact same root: the hematopoietic stem cell. Living inside the bone marrow, the hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) is the absolute progenitor of all blood cells without exception. The total number of HSCs residing in human bone marrow is estimated between 100,000 and 1,000,000, and these cells outlive the humans they inhabit. While calculating this precisely is impossible, mouse experiments suggest that a "true, long-lived HSC" could easily survive for 400 to 500 years. But its defining superpower is asymmetric division—it gives birth to a brand-new cell while remaining completely unchanged itself.
The choice of which developmental path to take happens right inside the bone marrow. At the first stage of asymmetric division, the HSC buds off a "multipotent progenitor cell" while keeping its original form intact. Depending on the surrounding chemical signals, this multipotent progenitor turns into either a myeloid or a lymphoid cell line—which serves as the main alternative to classical blood classification. Myeloid cells (or rather, their progenitors) stay in the bone marrow to mature, while some lymphoid progenitors pack up and move to the thymus to undergo rigorous training. Part of the myeloid line turns into erythrocytes, others into platelets, and others into myeloid leukocytes. As for the lymphoid progenitors, they all become lymphocytes: either NK cells (Natural Killers), or T- and B-lymphocytes. The lymphocytes that mature inside the bone marrow become B-cells, while those trained in the thymus become T-cells.
Natural Killers are the shock troops of innate immunity, usually making up 5 to 10% of all lymphocytes. Like overzealous traffic cops, they constantly audit the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) molecule—the genetic passport proving a cell is healthy and actually belongs to your body. If a virus or cancer forces a cell to hide this passport, the NK cell executes it on the spot, reacting to universal signals of cellular stress. The body relies on Natural Killers to purge cancerous, infected, and worn-out cells. Furthermore, because of their obsessive urge to "check ID," they contribute heavily to organ transplant rejection—which is why transplant surgeons absolutely detest them.
