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Round Hill firefighter takes on MS Challenge Walk
Cat Ippolito's life with multiple sclerosis started three years ago.
Ippolito, 26 today and a trainer with the county's Department of Fire, Rescue and Emergency Management, was body clipping her horse – shaving long winter hair from head to toe -- when her left arm felt numb.
Probably just the weight of the clippers, she thought.
By the next morning, she couldn't pick up her arm. By evening, her entire left side had stopped cooperating.
Ippolito has enough medical training – she's been a volunteer firefighter with Round Hill Volunteer Fire Department, a career firefighter with the county and is a trainer for the department today -- to know this was serious. A stroke, maybe. Brain cancer.
So when the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, a neurological disease that interrupts the processing of information in the brain, came a few weeks later, she was actually relieved.
Whatever MS was – all she could recall at the time was that Annette Funicello and Montel Williams had it – it was better than a stroke, she thought.
She knows a lot more about MS now, and will be striding along in her third annual Capital Challenge Walk Sept. 27-28. She's a member of local Team Heinen for the 50-kilometer walk. Before that, she'll be leading the Team Heinen Second Annual Yard Sale at the Round Hill Volunteer Fire Department July 20.
When she was diagnosed, she thought she didn't know anyone with MS. It turned out the mother of fellow firefighter John Heinen has had the disease for more than 20 years. Then she learned that a friend of a friend, a nurse at Johns Hopkins, was diagnosed six years ago. And there's the wife of another co-worker.
In fact, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society/National Capital Chapter, every hour of every day, someone in the United States is diagnosed. The disease is thought to be an autoimmune condition, in which the body's own defenses attack the protective sheaths around the nerves in the brain.
There is no cure, but research – funded in part by fundraisers like the National Capital Challenge Walk – has developed better treatments to keep MS in remission.
The start point of the walk in September has not been set, Ippolito said, but it will end, as it always does, at the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Last year, Team Heinen raised $17,000, and sent every penny on to the National MS Society.
This year, the goal is $30,000.
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