from Star Community Newspapers (link to full article)

By Ann Marie Shambaugh, Staff Writer

Frisco resident Derek Smith said he was scared when he learned as a teen-ager that his father had multiple sclerosis. Smith and his family knew little about the disease that afflicted an otherwise healthy and fit man.

Over the past 18 years he has watched the disease of the central nervous system take its toll on his father.

“Since [1990] we’ve learned quite a bit about it,” he said. “We spent a couple years trying to figure out what it meant, because it didn’t seem like he was that different, but over two decades now it’s to the point where he is wheelchair-bound and unable to work the same way he did before.”