By Kim Hilsenbeck

Months of medical issues for Sarah Meneses, 18, of Kyle — fatigue, weakness, appetite and weight loss, headaches and dizziness — led to months of testing and lab work for the teenager.

But the girl’s mother, Kim Meneses, said local doctors in Alaska – where the family lived at the time – couldn’t come up with a diagnosis, despite finding lesions on her daughter’s brain during an MRI.

“She’s had problems since 2009,” Kim said. “Sarah has balance issues; she doesn’t walk a straight line. She can walk short distances and needs to rest often.”

Kim said it was little things here and there, but nothing too alarming, that she and her husband, Sam, would notice.

“When she started school (at age 5) we realized she was a slower learner. She takes a little more time to think about what she wants to say,” Kim explained. “Anyone talking to her wouldn’t notice it.”

Sarah was home schooled for a while and is now getting her GED.

Back in 2009, medical professionals told the family to increase the girl’s intake of Vitamin D.

The Meneses moved to Kyle a few years ago. Then, in 2014, Sarah’s younger brother Nathan, now 16 and a sophomore at Lehman High School, experienced double vision and extreme fatigue. He started seeing a neurologist at Dell Children’s Hospital in Austin.

“It took months and lots of testing,” Kim said. “The doctor finally confirmed Multiple Sclerosis, or MS.”

That caused Kim and Sam to rethink Sarah’s situation.

“After Nathan’s diagnosis, we were thinking about her issues,” Kim said.

The family saw a specialist at Texas Children’s in Houston for Nathan. They asked his doctor to look at Sarah’s medical files. She was retested. Doctors finally gave the family a diagnosis: it was MS.

It took five long years to get a diagnosis for Sarah.

“We’ve been on a roller coaster of MRIs and all kinds of stuff,” Kim said. “But we count our blessings — other children are worse off.”

MS is an autoimmune disease; it destroys the protective myelin sheath over nerves.

“Those damaged areas lose communication with the rest of body,” Kim said.

For some, MS can be a debilitating disease. But there are different types of MS.

“They have what’s called relapsing remitting; the symptoms happen then stop for a while but then they come back,” Kim said.

So far, the Meneses children are on the fortunate side. They can walk and talk.

Kim said Sarah could have started treatments years ago if doctors had only thought to diagnose her with MS.

“They said she was too young to have it,” Kim said. “Usually the medical field says age 20-40 is the prime age when people develop MS.”

So they ruled it out as a cause of her illness.

“But they are finding more and more cases in children,” she said.

Yet, when they gave Sarah higher doses of Vitamin D (5,000 units daily), she felt better. Kim said doctors told her that people who live in northern states are more often diagnosed with MS. Her children were both born and lived for years in Alaska.

“One factor could be that people in northern states are inside more often so their Vitamin D levels are lower,” she said.

Despite the possible connection with low Vitamin D levels, Kim said medical professionals haven’t offered any real kind of prevention yet.

“They look at factors but they don’t really know how it’s caused,” she said. “It can be more prominent in some ethnicities. We’re Hispanic.”

Kim recommended parents become proactive advocates for their children’s health.

“If we would have pursued it for our daughter, she would have been on treatment a lot earlier,” Kim said.

But with doctors leading the family down the path that Sarah was too young, they didn’t have much else to go on until Nathan developed symptoms.

Kim said there are no other cases of MS in her family.

She said she’s heard some speculation that connects MS with the food stream and possibly vaccines. She said doctors have not found an exact cause.

“Treatment is for life,” she said. “There is no cure at this time.”

Join the Fight

MS Awareness Week is March 2-8. Lehman High School is holding a special series of events each day to raise awareness about the disease.

Mittens Monday
Wear padded gloves to demonstrate loss of feeling and motor skills

2 Shoe Tuesday
Wear mismatched shoes as an example of walking challenges

Create a ribbon Wednesday
Pin ribbons on the wall

#visionacure day on Thursday
Try on special glasses to show vision impairment

Orange Out Day & Assembly on Friday
Offer a prize to the person who is the best dressed Orange Out

Two sides of the same coin

Nathan and Sarah had different reactions to their having MS.

“At first I was freaked out a bit; I had no idea what MS was,” Nathan said recently. “After learning a lot of stuff, by then we’d heard it enough and understood it enough to be more relaxed about it. We have a plan and it’s going to turn out. It was a relief – there wasn’t any more questioning. Honestly MS hasn’t really affected me too much.”

Nathan said his future plans include becoming a music producer.

Sarah wrote her feelings in a letter after the interview. It said, in part:

“It’s a relief finally knowing what’s making me sick after all these years but it’s also scary, because when I meet others with MS that have worse symptoms than me, I wonder and worry if that may happen to me. I know that when I REALLY think about MS I want to hit something. I still haven’t gotten used to having MS. I can admit that I have it, hear people talk about it, but I can’t quite make myself believe it yet even when I take medicine for it. One day I might be able to but for now I can’t get used to it.”