Masta Ace Reveals He Has Multiple Sclerosis

Exclusive: After living with Multiple Sclerosis for more than a decade, Masta Ace for the first-time discusses his life with the disease.

Masta Ace thought something was wrong. It was 1999, and when he would take hot showers, he would sometimes get the sensation that his left arm and part of his neck would go asleep. It was similar to the pins and needles sensation a person feels when they lie in a certain position for too long before moving, but Ace was in the shower, standing up.

Later that year, the rapper temporarily lost the vision in his left eye. It was as if someone had taken a photo and the flash had temporarily blinded him. But the loss of vision persisted for a month before returning. He went to the doctor, who told him that he had optic neuritis, a condition normally associated with central nervous system issues.

During the summer of 2000, Masta Ace had an episode in which both of his feet felt as if they had fallen asleep. But this wasn’t a fleeting sensation. It lasted for about a week.

Masta Ace did not make a connection between the incidents, but he was concerned. “I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know what,” Masta Ace says during an exclusive interview with HipHopDX. “You start thinking the worst kind of stuff ‘cause it’s weird, like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ I didn’t know that the two things were connected, but I just knew that weird stuff was happening and I needed to find out why.”

Masta Ace then went to the doctor. The doctors ran a battery of tests on him, including a lumbar puncture, also known as a spinal tap, in order to collect a sample of his cerebrospinal fluid.

Masta Ace Is Diagnosed With Multiple Sclerosis
The diagnosis came back. Masta Ace had multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic disease that attacks the central nervous system, which is made up of the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves. The specific symptoms, severity and progress of MS vary from person to person. Numbness and vision problems are common symptoms of MS.

Masta Ace said he was stunned. To his knowledge, none of his relatives had the disease. The ratio is 1:40 for people who have a close relative (parent, sibling, child) with the disease. The general public’s risk in the general population is 1:750, according to nationalmssociety.org. MS is more common in women than men, and is most prevalent among Caucasians of northern European ancestry. Masta Ace did not fit the profile.

Masta Ace got his diagnosis at the end of 2000. Like most people in similar situations, he was sad and wondered why this was happening to him. His wife, Schea, had a more positive outlook. Masta Ace says she advised him to just take his medicine and go about his life as usual.

Masta Ace was prescribed to have a weekly injection of Avonex. The medicine, which he is supposed to take for the rest of his life, provides “a reduced risk of disability progression, … fewer exacerbations, and … a reduction in number and size of active lesions in the brain (as shown on MRI) when compared with the group taking a placebo,” according to nationalmssociety.org.

Around the time he first got on the medicine, Masta Ace had some significant MS-related episodes. The most striking took place when he was driving in New York from Greenwich Village back to his native Brooklyn. Both of his arms and legs went completely numb. Masta Ace pulled over and sat in his car with his wife until the symptoms subsided. 

Masta Ace had not put out an album since 1995’s Sittin’ On Chrome. It was nearly six years later and he did not want to announce that he had MS.

“I wasn’t really ready for people to be hitting me with the, ‘Ah, that’s terrible,’” Masta Ace says. “I didn’t want anybody to feel sorry for me. I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t want the pity. I didn’t want any of that. I basically took it as a setback and a sign that it was time to reenergize and just really, really go in.”

Sittin’ On Chrome, his third album, was Masta Ace’s most commercially successful LP. But its West Coast-leaning sound and car-centric themes and videos left many of his fans unsatisfied, especially those in New York.

“When I got that diagnosis, I had been kinda at a crossroads careerwise where I kinda felt like I was done,” Masta Ace says. “That diagnosis kind of reenergized me because it made me feel like I didn’t know what my quality of life was going to be like down the road and if I was going to really do this, then I really needed to make my last couple artistic statements.”

http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.26512/title.masta-ace-reveals-he-has-multiple-sclerosis

“I wasn’t really ready for people to be hitting me with the, ‘Ah, that’s terrible,’” 

I find this annoying too, good for him for coping and staying strong.

They started almost ever paragraph with "Masta Ace"

Much Respect To The Ace

Thats mad and a proper shame, one of my Top 5 favourite MC's. I wish him all the best.