26 msfocusmagazine.org Life With MS Getting to Getting to Know Jack Know Jack MS Focus: You were diagnosed with relapsing MS six years ago, and you were 26 at the time. Can you take us back to that moment? Jack Osbourne: Like with most people, you come to realize it was a bit of a journey to get diagnosed. I’ll start with what got me to the doctor. I was away filming a show. We had a day off, and I went to a movie. On the way back, we stopped at a gas station. While I was paying at the register, a little black dot just appeared right in the center of myvision in my right eye. I thought, “It must be a migraine or something.” So, I took some medicine and went to bed. The next day, the dot kind of turned cigar shaped, and, by the end of the day, it was an “L” in my vision. Forty-eight hours later, I’d lost about 90 percent of my central vision in my right eye. I went to the hospital and that’s when I had the first MRI. It was funny. When I was at hospital, they had me do the eye test where you read the letters on the wall. I would read the letters fine with my left eye, and, for some reason, I think they thought I was faking that I literally couldn’t see anything with my right eye. It was funny because these nurses kept coming in and they’d ask, “So, you can’t see that?” And I’d say,“Iliterallycannotseeanything.”Thesenurses just seemed so perplexed that I could see fine with my left eye, but not out of my right. After the MRI and, you know, a whole slew of getting poked and prodded, and getting a spinal tap and all that, they brought in a neurologist. That’s when we kind of realized that, eighteen months prior, when my legs had gone numb for four months, that this was starting to look like MS. So, I’d say it was an eighteen month process to get diagnosed. MS Focus: Wow. Eighteen months. When you finallygottheanswer,whatwasrunningthrough your mind at that moment? Jack Osbourne: To be honest, I didn’t really know what MS was. I knew it was a disease, but I didn’t know what it did. I was like, “but what does this mean?” The doctor gave me long-winded answers about what MS was, but I still didn’t understand it. I wasn’t necessarily scared, just really confused. I thought, “how could I have got this?” I did that whole laundry list of “who, what, where, when, how, and why.” I was trying to wrap my head around it. That was a little frustrating, just because of my own lack of understanding. Once I really started to educate myself, my attitude shifted. I was like, “It’s not the end of the world-yet. What do I gotta do? How proactive can I be?” MS Focus: It’s the five year anniversary of your webisode series You Don’t Know Jack about MS. Why did you decide to do the webisodes? Jack Osbourne: A little after, or within, the first year after diagnosis, I went through the whole thought of “Do I start a charity?” I realized pretty Jack Osborne grew up in the public eye. Since being diagnosedwith MS, he uses his celebrity to bring awareness to the MS cause. On the five-year anniversary of his popular web series (You Don’t KnowJack about MS,) Jack sat down with MS Focus to discuss the message he shares.