or if she will be free of MS symptoms for the rest of her life. That is Stephanie LaMotta’s torment-not knowing if tomorrow is the day she becomes a prisoner in her own body. Or they can come once, disappear, and never appear again. Or the symptoms can come and go during a lifetime. Symptoms ranging from minor to major paralysis, to vision impairment-which can be complete blindness-can become permanent. The effect is similar to what happens when an electrical wire short-circuits. In MS, a disease that afflicts about 250,000 Americans, the protective coating around nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord inexplicably begins to deteriorate. The disease wages a psychological warfare upon those afflicted that is nearly as debilitating as its attack upon the central nervous system. The special terror of MS is its uncertainty-the daily, chilling fear sufferers carry for a lifetime. But to see her today doing her vigorous boxing workout, you’d never know this was a woman with a gun to her head. The paralysis left, but she still has no feeling on her left side. For nine months in 1980, her entire left side was paralyzed.
She once played both guitar and piano, but hasn’t played either since that day in 1979 when the weakness in her left hand appeared, and stayed.
On others, she says, she can’t see her hand in front of her face. At this point, I was wearing a Braille watch. John Schaefer, was the one who diagnosed me for MS. “The first two doctors I saw were ophthalmologists, and they had no idea what was wrong. By the time I got to New York to start seeing doctors, I was blind. “It was like a shade descending slowly over my sight. “Shortly after that, I was on vacation in Vienna when I started losing sight in my right eye. Then I started dropping things and falling down. “I didn’t think much about it at the time. All I could do with my left hand was slide it down the guitar. “All of a sudden, I couldn’t press the strings with my left fingers. “I was the guitarist, and I was playing the lead riff, a piece I’d played hundreds of times,” she said. She was in a London recording studio, cutting a record with her band, called “Stephanie LaMotta’s Band.” His intended victim, Stephanie LaMotta was serving a life term with MS.
He got only seven years, for attempted murder. “When the police came, I was holding his head off the sidewalk, wondering if he was alive.” “I hit him in the stomach with my left hand and as he started to double up, I hit him on the jaw with my right. When I saw blood from the cut, I went into a rage. “He tried to stab me, but I blocked the knife with my left hand. “Then I said: ‘Do you know who I am? I’m going to hurt you if you use that.’
“I said: ‘Come over to my car and I’ll write you a small check.’ Then he wanted my jewelry, and he pulled out a knife.
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