Brandao, who was diagnosed with MS in 2018, thought long and hard about leaving Brazil, where she had health insurance, to join her husband’s family in the U.S. She weighed the growing violence and increasing costs of quality education for her daughters there against starting over and facing the difficulty of continuing her treatment here.After the Brandaos’ immigration paperwork was ready, they moved to Maryland in the Spring of 2022. Within days, she was searching the internet and making phone calls in hopes of finding a way to continue her treatment.“There was always a problem, some difficulty, people who didn’t have information,” Brandao says. “I felt like a fool walking around with my records all over the place.”Then she found out about the Society’s summit. “I’m going,” she told her husband.Dr. Manrique-Trujillo, who helped her, says the first summit was decisive in his career. As part of his fellowship at MedStar Health in the nation’s capital region, he treats members of the Hispanic/Latinx community with MS and also devotes time as a volunteer to a nonprofit clinic in hopes of improving its access to health services.As he listened to the stories of people with MS during the event, he thought of the typical difficulties of dealing with the disease. “I can’t image what it would be like if you don’t speak the language, you don’t have any relatives nearby or a friend to give you a hand,” he thought.Dr. Manrique-Trujillo believes that part of his job as a healthcare professional is to understand the circumstances his patients face in life, so when Brandao mentioned she lived nearby, he offered her an office consultation, which ended up lasting three hours.She was overwhelmed with gratitude.“When I left, I had a hard time believing it was true,” says Brandao.
