A resident adviser and resident connection like no other

Brittany Galla
News Editor

One was a resident adviser; the other one a resident—but this wasn’t the usual RA relationship—this was a relationship where a resident and RA were able to find friendship and comfort through something they shared: being diagnosed and dealing with Multiple Sclerosis.

MS is a chronic, unpredictable neurological disease that affects the central nervous system, according to the National MS Society.

Both their experiences with MS are different, but their struggles to deal with the illness are something they’ve learned to connect through.

Last November, right before Thanksgiving, Shanelle DeBrito-Hightower, a sixth semester RA in Brownell Hall and senior social work major, woke up one morning in her dorm room, opened her eyes, and was not able to see out of her right eye. Never experiencing anything like this or having any health problems, Hightower said she got worried, and went right away to the eye doctor to find out what was wrong.

“I had been experiencing migraines, but I was just ignoring them because I was busy and stuff,” she said.

The doctor couldn’t see anything on her outer eye, and the next thing DeBrito-Hightower knew, she was admitted to the hospital and put on IV/steroids. After cat scans of her brain were taken, the problem was identified: the back of the nerve by her eye was swelling—and she the reason was because she had MS.
The messages the central nervous system sends out to the rest of the body is protected by myelin—but a body of a person who has MS sees myelin as foreign, and the body attacks it and breaks it.

After her hospital stay, DeBrito-Hightower was put on medication—a three-times-a-week self-injection—for MS, but today, she doesn’t have 100 percent vision; she has 65 percent in the right eye and 85 percent in the left eye.

Michelle Hohl, a junior nursing major, has a different experience with MS than Hightower does—she has lymes disease on top of her MS. Hohl was diagnosed with MS as a freshman at St. Joseph’s College in Oct. 2004, and then she got lyme disease in Dec. ’06. Her MS symptoms included: numbness on half of her body and double vision.

After transferring to Southern and finding out her RA had MS as well, DeBrito-Hightower also helped Hohl deal with her own struggles with MS.

“She’s actually the first young person I met,” she said. “We’ve both been helping each other.”

People with MS have different symptoms and reactions to the illness-so DeBrito-Hightower’s symptoms were different than Hohls.

There is no cure for MS, and DeBrito-Hightower will have to give herself injections for the rest of her life, only to be stopped when she is pregnant, as the medicine can affect the unborn baby.

DeBrito-Hightower had to adjust her everyday life after her diagnosis with MS, having to register with the Disability and Resource Center on campus and have her computer adjusted so she could read the letters.

She said the transition from life before MS to life with MS was difficult—and she struggled to stay positive; and even thought about resigning as an RA.

“It was probably the lowest point of my life—I said to myself, ‘I’m just not coming back, period,’” she said.

“But then I realized I needed to figure out a way to fight this.”

Although she kept her position as being an RA, DeBrito-Hightower still had to make changes.

“I get very tired now and have to stop whatever I’m doing—I can’t over-push myself,” she said. “I used to do long hours on [the] graveyard shift when I first became an RA, but I can’t do that anymore.”

Dealing with her own MS struggles, DeBrito-Hightower started to feel like she wasn’t being fair to her residents.

“Here I am, supposed to be here for all these residents who are looking for help, and here I am needing help,” she said.

She found help from an unusual person: one of her residents, Michelle Hohl, who, as she discovered, was struggling with MS. Since Hohl was diagnosed with it two years earlier, she was able to help DeBrito-Hightower with any questions and worries she had since Hohl had already gone through it.

“She educated me more on the disease,” said DeBrito-Hightower. “We helped each other so much—she has helped me to adjust to this. We’ve shared information from our doctors and just stuff we hear—it’s been wonderful having her. She was always on call—you know how RAs are always supposed to be on call? Well, she became always on call for me.”

Hohl was there for DeBrito-Hightower during what DeBrito-Hightower calls the “worst”: the three-times-a-week injections. At first, DeBrito-Hightower was so scared and worried to do it; she would take two hours until she finally did it because she would experience such anxiety over it. Instead of going through it alone, she would call Hohl over and they would sit, talk and DeBrito-Hightower would have enough courage to finally do it.

“The injections are not something you get accustomed to,” said Hohl. “You do it because you have to.”

“I would think this is crazy—she is my resident and I’m going to her for help,” DeBrito-Hightower said.

As an RA with duty responsibilities, DeBrito-Hightower has to schedule her time around the injections, asking her co-RAs to cover her shift for 20 minutes so she could do the shot—and as the 20 minutes would turn into two hours, her staff was always there willing to cover.

“I took support on campus for granted,” she said. “Everyone has been extremely supportive and has been there for me. We’re so close-knit of a family—we live together; this is our building and everyone pulled together.”

According to Hohl, DeBrito-Hightower’s company through all this has been important.

“She can help me in ways no one else can,” she said. “She can relate to stuff I’ve been through—I’ve been there; she’s in my shoes that I was in two years ago. It’s moral support for the both of us.”

These days, DeBrito-Hightower is getting ready to graduate in a few weeks, but her experience with MS will always stay with her.

“I have always loved this quote; it’s from the Bible: Walk by faith, and not by sight,” she said, pointing to the cutout letters that are pasted on her dorm room wall. “It’s literally so true and I never realized it: You wake up, you open your eyes, and you can see—I didn’t realize the small necessities you take for granted because one day, I didn’t have that.”

Most importantly, DeBrito-Hightower said the situation taught her more about the special relationship RAs and residents can have.

“As RAs, we go through things too,” she said. “And we can learn so much from our residents.”

But for Hohl, DeBrito-Hightower will always be more than just her RA.

“I see her as my RA, but we’re more of a friendship,” she said. “We’re in this together.”

Comments

[Andrew Golding]

What wonderful and strong individuals. If we only knew the difficult challenges other people faced on a daily basis, we would take into consideration how minute some of our problems are.

[Moncler Jakke]

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