Following her MS diagnosis, Teri Garr began traveling across the country speaking publicly about her disease and became an ambassador for the Multiple Sclerosis Society. “I’m working to change how others look at people with this awful disease,” she told The South Bend Tribune in 2003. The actress also became a paid spokesperson for an MS medication. Among the symptoms she experienced by the early 2000s were memory issues, fatigue, cognition problems, and a limp. “I’ve never thought of myself as a victim and never will,” she said.
During her speaking engagements, she encouraged others with MS to be their “own health advocate,” enquiring whether they were on medication. “We have treatments now that we didn’t have before,” she said in 2005. And through it all, she was raising a daughter born just six years before her official diagnosis. “I try to reserve the top-notch time, my best energy, for her,” she said.
