Lis Van Lynden, 51, became the healthiest she’d ever been – and happier too – despite the odds
WORDS: KATE CHAPMAN, FRANCES LEATE. PHOTOS: LIS VAN LYNDEN
Cycling across the finish line with friends and family cheering me on was the most amazing feeling. It was a crisp, sunny December day and I’d just ridden more than 5,000 miles around the coast of Great Britain, raising almost £10,000 for the Multiple Sclerosis Trust – a cause that has special meaning to me.
I’d left London seven months earlier, carrying everything I needed in a few small bags on my trusty bike, named Gertie. I camped until the weather made it impossible and then stayed with friends and in hotels until I reached the finish line. It was a world away from the devastation I’d felt 10 years earlier.
In March 2013, aged 40, I woke up at 2am with a terrible shooting pain running through my right arm. When I showered, the right side of my body started to feel numb until I could barely feel a thing. Panicked and scared, I went straight to the doctor and when I explained I’d also had painful headaches, he looked concerned. I was taken to A&E at Charing Cross Hospital, in London, for an MRI scan.
When the doctor asked if I’d suffered any trauma, I said no, assuming they meant physical rather than emotional.
But looking back, I’d been through a lot. My brother, Jan Carel, died in a sailing accident in 1991, when he was just 17, and a year later my father died, aged 46, from stomach cancer. I then lost my beloved mum, Viva, then 58, to lung cancer in January 2005.
TAKING ITS TOLL
Now I had a wife and a career as a travel agent, but I started to wonder if all that tragedy and loss had finally started to take its toll. Three months later, scans showed I had fluid on my brain and spine. My neurologist confirmed that I had multiple sclerosis (MS), an autoimmune condition affecting the brain and spinal cord. I felt lost.
‘Going forward, your life won’t be the same, but we are not going to cry over this news,’ he told me, encouraging a stoicism I didn’t feel. It took years to accept I had the condition. In the meantime, I struggled with chronic headaches, extreme fatigue and numbness in my right hand.
Then, in September 2017, my wife told me she couldn’t give me the support I needed and left. I was devastated and, to be honest, I’m not sure I could have continued if I hadn’t come across the Multiple Sclerosis Trust, who offered me counselling and pee
