Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto had already survived a near-fatal bout with Hodgkin's lymphoma when he suddenly started to suffer episodes of blindness, tingling and other strange symptoms back in 1997.
He thought the cancer was back, but he was wrong.
Doctors told Cavuto that he had multiple sclerosis. "In a way, it was worse," he says now. "With MS, there is no cure."
About a decade earlier, Cavuto had fought a deadly tumor with chemo and radiation. He won that battle, but the MS diagnosis left him with a host of unpredictable symptoms and the prospect of getting far worse.
MS is a disease of the central nervous system that can cause episodes of blindness, tingling, numbness and loss of balance. In advanced cases, the disease can cause paralysis. About 400,000 people in the USA suffer from the disorder.
No one knows for sure what causes MS, but it is thought to be an auto-immune disease in which the body's immune system attacks its own tissue ? in this case myelin, the protective coating surrounding nerves. That damage interferes with electrical signals traveling down the nerve fibers, says John Richert, vice president for research at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society in New York.
Cavuto remembers that the diagnosis left him in shock. "I kept asking, 'Why me?' " He says he didn't want to put his family through another medical ordeal. And his doctors painted a grim picture of his prognosis.
Cavuto suffers from secondary progressive MS, a type of the disease that steadily gets worse.
He dealt with that initial shock by facing the disease. He told his boss at Fox News and others about his illness. And to this day, he has to acknowledge what might happen if the disease progresses. "I really don't want to end up in a wheelchair, but that might happen," he says.
Eight years after getting his diagnosis, the 47-year-old TV journalist is still walking ? most days without a cane. He suffers from balance problems, weakness and back pain, but he's still the anchor of the popular cable business show Your World with Neil Cavuto. And he manages to make it all seem easy despite the fact that on a bad day, he'll have a sudden loss of vision that makes reading the teleprompter impossible.
