Hannah Mockler Brushed Off Bizarre Loo Symptoms Before MS Diagnosis
Hannah Mockler, 34, from Derbyshire, lived with urgent bladder problems for more than a decade before a sudden loss of vision led to a multiple sclerosis diagnosis at the end of 2025. She now uses a walking stick and catheters, and wonders about earlier treatment.
Hannah Mockler, 34, from Derbyshire, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) at the end of 2025 after she brushed off bizarre loo symptoms for more than a decade. She never saw a doctor about them.
MS is a lifelong condition affecting the brain and spinal cord. More than 150,000 people in the UK live with it, and recent estimates show that number has increased.
Symptoms range from extreme fatigue and dizziness to problems with balance and memory. They differ from person to person, which makes the condition hard to diagnose. It is incurable and unpredictable, and in some forms it flares up at times or steadily worsens.
Mockler now uses a walking stick, has lost feeling down the right side of her body and uses catheters for worsening bladder problems. She wonders how different her life might have been had she started treatment years earlier.
Years of unexplained symptoms
Since her early 20s, Mockler had lived with sudden, desperate urges to urinate. Her sleep was regularly broken by trips to the toilet. She also struggled to swallow tablets without choking and sometimes had to think consciously about swallowing food and drink.
Having had the symptoms for so long, she dismissed them. “I always assumed it was just me being weird,” she said.
The first clear warning came around four years ago. She woke with pins and needles in both hands after a violent bout of sickness and first thought she had hurt herself while vomiting. The tingling turned to numbness and weakness in her fingers, making it hard to grip things.
Her GP told her to come back in eight weeks if the problem persisted. It never went away.
Over the next three years, Mockler repeatedly visited doctors and underwent nerve tests and physiotherapy. She got no answers. She began to suspect some doctors thought the problem was psychological.
“Maybe it’s just psychological, like it’s in your head,” she said. “Ironically, not quite in the way they thought.”
Sight loss sends her to A&E
In November last year, Mockler woke to find what felt like a film over the right side of her vision. She first blamed tiredness or the bright lights at the supermarket where she had recently started work as an online shopper. She struggled to read the small print on her handheld scanner.
Within days her eyesight worsened. She could no longer make out the letters in the bottom-right corner of her phone keyboard, and her family joked about the mistakes in her messages.
After about a week, she booked an appointment at her local Scrivens opticians, expecting a new prescription. Her eyes looked healthy, but further tests showed she had lost part of her peripheral vision.
The optician handed her an envelope with the results and told her to go straight to A&E. He had written “go today” in the bottom-right corner. Mockler could not see the message because that part of her vision had gone, but a follow-up message prompted her to go.
She had already been referred to neurology over the numbness in her hands and was still waiting for an appointment. At King’s Mill Hospital, doctors first feared a brain aneurysm. Her vision kept deteriorating until she could look straight at someone’s face and see only one eye.
After nine days in hospital, scans showed damage to the protective covering of nerves in her brain. Doctors suspected multiple sclerosis.
