By Rick Madewell
Assistant Editor

Jeff Hamilton was just a normal guy at 24 – working out, playing pick-up basketball games. He was a jock, a tough guy. And he was in the prime of his life to enjoy it to the fullest.

Then his life changed – dramatically and, quite possibly, forever.

He had just returned home after a nothing-out-of-the-ordinary basketball game when his legs began to tingle and went into a rubber-like state. The strange and frightening sensation quickly moved up into his chest.

During the next six months, he went to his family doctor, an orthopedic surgeon and a neurologist. Finally, Hamilton was told he had multiple sclerosis.

The 49-year-old St. Cloud man has had to deal with the disease for 25 years, taking medications to ease the effects and taking two-hour daily naps to deal with the mental fatigue it brings.

But since 2006, he has attempted to bring about awareness of the disease, much of that with the Osceola County and Orange County ANTS – A Natural Tough Self-Starter, because, as Hamilton puts it, “If you have MS, you’ve got to be tough and self-start yourself every day.”

The Osceola ANTS, which touts about 150 members, meets every third Thursday and always has a professional speaker.

“The philosophy of the ANTS is what we go by,” Hamilton said. “I want colonies all over the place. When you think of a colony, you think of family, and we’re family.”

Hamilton and his group will be participating in two special upcoming events: Walk MS 2011 at Lake Eola March 19 and at Ormond Beach March 26, as well as Bike MS: The Citrus Tour May 14-15, at Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales.

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society awarded Hamilton with The Sally Buegeleisen Memorial Impact award last November for his work in Central Florida. Buegeleisen was able to raise more than $1 million for the cause over a 20-year period through writing campaigns.

“I do not like to write but I do walk the walk and talk the talk,” Hamilton said.

The St. Cloud man’s biggest hope is that a cure for multiple sclerosis will be found soon. It’s his driving passion to create enough awareness about the disease that someone, somewhere is bound to create the cure.

“We are the pioneers of MS now and we’ve got to find a vaccine or a cure for it,” he said.

Hamilton explained MS is a debilitating disease that has three levels: relapsing/remitting; secondary progressive; and progressive. Hamilton suffers from the relapsing level, the mildest of the three. His legs tingle and go numb and he can’t go a day without taking that two-hour nap.

“You have to learn to accept you have MS,” he said. “I have accepted that I have to take that nap every day or I cannot function in the evening.”

Symptoms and outcomes include becoming crippled, becoming blind, bowel problems and urinary tract problems. But, Hamilton quickly adds, not every person suffers from the disease in the same way. He said there also is the potential for short-term memory loss with the disease, which attacks a person’s nervous system, as well as the spinal cord. A doctor once told Hamilton that the worst case of MS he had seen was a person who could see and comprehend, but could not move at all.

Hamilton worked at Disney for 24 years before claiming disability in 2006. He remains bothered to this day that he was only one year shy of earning the Tinkerbell Statue Award, given to those who give the company 25 years of service.

“I was a decorator there and after a while, I was really overheating while working,” he said.

According to Hamilton, MS affects 70 percent of women and 30 percent of men. The national MS Society, he said, estimates 400,000 suffer from the disease. He, however, believes that number is much higher.

“There’s a lot more than that. I can tell you that right now,” he said, offering up his membership numbers in one county – Osceola – as proof. He added that at the first ANTS meeting in Orange County, more than 70 people showed up.

He explained his biggest goals in life.

“My three goals are to help out people today who are living with this devastating disease. The second goal is to help find the cure,” he said. “The third goal is to walk my three daughters down the aisle without any assistance.”

More on the MS walk and bike ride can be found at www.midfloridamswalks.org. The Central Florida MS website is www.nmss.org/flc.