The day I realized how bad the situation was, I was sitting on a crowded pool deck.
A few hours earlier, my sister, Christina, had woken me in the middle of the night with another headache. It was the winter of 2007, and she had been on disability leave from Virginia back home to our family home in Scranton, Lackawanna County, when she started getting headaches and falling.
Without a diagnosis, doctors sent her home while they tried to determine the cause. She was 26 years old and a few years out of college, having graduated from Temple University, where she played on the women’s varsity team.
The headaches got worse and more frequent, and in December of that year, a doctor told her parents they needed to take her to a neurologist, so they loaded her into their car and drove about 250 miles to Georgetown University Hospital.
I was a senior in high school. I was the captain of the swim team, and the meet was our local swim meet. My parents sent me to the meet.
I remember feeling isolated as I sat on the pool deck surrounded by other swimmers, many adults asking me what was going on and me having to repeatedly reply, “I don’t know.”
It also reminds me of the usual sounds of a swim meet.
“Swimmers, take your positions,” there was a beep, splashes, and cheers.
I wanted to go home.
***
I am the youngest of six children, four boys and two girls, and we grew up in North Scranton in a one-story yellow house with a wrap-around white porch that one of my brothers built on a corner lot next to my grandparents’ house.
Most of my siblings had moved out by my senior year of high school, but that winter my sister was back in the bottom bed in the “girls’ room” we all shared as kids. When I was little, she would sleep in the bottom bunk and push up the top bunk to make me laugh, and when I got scared, she would reach over and hold my hand until I fell asleep.
Christina is eight years older than me. I was her very own Barbie doll, and I burned her ears with a curling iron at least once. I cried when she left for college in 2000.
In 2007, she was back in the same bright green room we had chosen as children.
My mother later told me that she held Christina in the back seat the entire drive to Georgetown Hospital and prayed that she wouldn’t die.
Christina lost her ability to walk and talk, was unable to grasp utensils or other objects, and at one point had to be fitted with a feeding tube.
She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that affects the body’s central nervous system. Symptoms range from numbness and speech impair to movement disorders. There is no cure.
Christina was put on medication and went to a rehab facility in Scranton, where she regained all of her lost function, though she was unable to work for a total of about three months.
***
Then, well, life went on.
I went to Temple University and my wife moved back to Virginia. She started doing yoga and she started running. We ran two marathons together, one in Philadelphia and one in Scranton.
In college, I organized fundraisers for MS organizations, and I realized her story wasn’t all that uncommon. I met other people affected by MS. Some of them had MS themselves, others had loved ones with symptoms like mobility issues that put them in a wheelchair. Others had lost loved ones to complications from multiple sclerosis.
Christina is making the most of her time now: She and her husband, Jim, frequently travel to other states, frequent live events, hike around the country, and, honestly, there are too many activities to count.
The past few years have been full of setbacks. She has had to change her medication several times. In 2021, Christina had to change her medication and lost some of her mobility and speech skills. Living hundreds of miles apart, we finally got into the habit of talking every night on my drive home.
She went back to rehab, started moving again, and life started again.
Last December, she texted me: “Can I train you to climb Mount Katahdin in Maine?” She said if I got in shape for it, she and her husband would take care of the rest.
Christina and Jim have both climbed Mount Katahdin, which at 5,269 feet is the highest mountain in Maine and the northern terminus of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. There are a few ways to get to the summit, but our plan is to take the Hunt Trail, which is part of the Appalachian Trail.
And that’s the journey I want you to read about. This will be a three-part series about my journey to and (hopefully) completion of climbing Mount Katahdin with my sister and her husband at the end of August.
I said yes to the hike because I don’t know how many more opportunities I’ll have to do this with my sister, but then again, doesn’t that sound like something we all agree on?
This is your chance to make the most of your time with her.
Ann Leylatt is a staff writer for LNP|LancasterOnline. This column is the first in an occasional series about training for her journey to climb Mount Katahdin with her sister.
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