The Heartbreak of TickledyBumptyBoom

Actress Teri Garr Isn't Exactly Laughing Off Multiple Sclerosis. But She's Not Holding a Pity Party Either

When you have multiple sclerosis -- as I learned I did three years ago -- your language becomes infused with grim disease lingo: brain atrophy, white-matter lesions, demyelination. So it's refreshing to hear somebody refer to the disease as TickledyBumptyBoom.

That someone would be actress, dancer and comedian Teri Garr, who revealed in 2002 that she's had MS for nearly two decades. MS is a chronic, progressive disease of unknown origin in which the immune system appears to attack the protective coating on nerves in the brain and spinal cord. After years of keeping mum, Garr recently has gone quite public with her illness: She's a spokeswoman for Rebif (one of the four injectable, disease-modifying drugs approved for treating the most common form of MS) and has been named the first chair of the National MS Society's Women Against MS program.

I got to chat with her on the phone last month, just us two gals, talking about . . . TickledyBumptyBoom.

Tell me about your symptoms right now. The only one I've heard you talk about is your slight limp, which I don't think anyone would notice if they didn't know.

Well, it depends on if I'm tired or not. Sometimes it's worse than other times. Mostly it's my right side. It's a weakness; my right hand and arm are weak, and my right leg.

I haven't had any other symptoms. I've never had vision problems, but I have this arm thing, and leg thing, on my right side. Not on my left side. It's very interesting, how different things happen to different people. What symptoms do you have?

I don't have any physical symptoms right now; I started out being one of the numb and tingly people. But I'm getting to that stage of life where I can't remember people's names sometimes, and little dumb memory lapses, and you have to think, "Is that because I'm 43 or because I have MS?"

I know. I know. I say the same thing about my vision. Someone says, "Well, you need glasses now because of the MS." And I say, "I need glasses because everybody my age can't read the menu."

I do get frustrated a little bit with my right-side weakness, because I do drop a lot of things.

About a year or so ago, I used to trip and fall a lot -- I mean fall. I fell down a flight of stairs in my house at least three times. I finally got up one day and went, "I am not going to do this again." Now I walk very carefully, very slowly. When I'm on the stairs, I watch where each foot goes.