Naomi Banno, Japan

Naomi Banno first developed symptoms of MS in 1986, when she was 23. It took one year for her to be diagnosed. She has had two relapses since. Naomi became a member of the Japanese Society of PwMS in 1992.

In February 1986 Naomi saw a doctor because she had a symptom like a cold. In March she had a headache and told her family. In April she had an acute numbness of the fingers of the left hand and it became paralysed. In June she was hospitalised in the orthopaedics section of a general hospital. (The doctor thought it was a tumour on the spinal cord.) She became unable to move the left leg all of a sudden and fell down the stairs of the hospital. From the hospital in the middle of September she became unable to move without a wheelchair instead of a cane. In October an acquaintance of Naomi’s father introduced her to an orthopedist (a doctor in private practice). The orthopedist introduced her to a cerebral neurosurgeon and she has been seeing him since (the doctor thought it was a cerebral infarction). In December of 1986 Naomi was told by a doctor that it was a disease of neurointernal medicine after she was examined in a department of cerebral neurosurgery of a general hospital, and saw a neurointernist. In February 1987 she I was hospitalised in a department of neurointernal medicine of the same hospital. It was diagnosed as MS after she had had many examinations.

In 1999, Naomi was given the chance to spend eight months with staff and volunteers of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada (MSSC) and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS) in the United States as a trainee. It was also in 1999 that Naomi became the Japanese representative for the PwMSIC.

Over the past six years Naomi has been very active in the MS arena in Japan. In 2000, she took up the post of President of the Aichi Chapter of the Japan Society for PwMS and became the Sub-secretary of the national MS society in 2005. Now Naomi is part of the counseling team at the MS Tomorrows Peer Counseling Center.

In 2006 she took part in an MS Nursing Exchange Programme with the MS Society of Victoria.