One Step at a Time

Almost every day Lori Schneider receives an e-mail from someone suffering with multiple sclerosis (MS). Like the one she got a few days ago from a young woman in her 20s, asking to speak with Schneider.

“I’m afraid,” the woman wrote. “I’ve been afraid for a whole year. I think my physical life is over.”

It’s those moments, when Schneider can be an inspiration to a fellow MS patient, that she knows it was all worth it. With each slow, agonizing step to the top of Mt. Everest, Schneider, 52, thought about her own journey with MS and the people she knows who struggle just to walk with the disease. And then she would take another step.

Finally, on Saturday, May 23 she became the first person with MS to reach the highest point in the world, the summit of Mt. Everest.

“I thought, if they have the courage to live with this disease then I’ve got the courage to keep going,” she said from her home in Bayfield, Wisconsin. “So many people with MS have pain each day. Each step is hard. I just wanted to encourage those people to take one more step.”

Schneider knows how difficult it is because 10 years ago she was there herself, unable to move half her body. But each day she pushed herself and a year after her diagnosis she climbed 22,841-foot Mt. Aconcagua in South America.

From there she dedicated herself to climbing the highest peaks on the earth’s seven continents, the dream she realized last May.

The final 3,000 feet of Everest’s 29,000 feet—battling 60 mph winds and brain deteriorating altitude—was the most exhausting, she said. Weather conditions grew so bad during the 11-hour climb that when she finally reached the top there was near-zero visibility. She could barely see her fellow climbers. Someone had to tell her that she had reached the summit.

She had barely enough time to call her father by satellite phone back in Janesville, Wisconsin. “I’m here Dad,” she said. “I’m on the summit. I made it.”

Her father, her inspiration to begin mountain climbing, was giddy. It was as if, she said, after weeks of holding his breath, he could finally let loose with a shout. But with his next breath he said, “You got up there, but we’ve got to get you down.”

Moments later, the team was headed down, anxious to get back to camp as the storm grew worse. When she reached her tent, exhaustion finally set in as she collapsed into a deep sleep. There had been no time or energy to take it all in, to reflect on the accomplishment. It wasn’t until the next morning, Schneider said, that she awoke and thought: “Gosh, I climbed Mt. Everest yesterday.”

It was a powerful moment, as if she could hear the collective screams of joy from supporters in Bayfield and across the U.S., people she had drawn so much strength from on her climb.

“You realize what a speck on the universe you are and yet how interconnected we are as well,” she said.