Crafting Kindness — Tangie Brown’s Story

Tangie Brown is tenacious - she is a wife, a mother of two, and a champion for kindness and self-care. She loves spending time with her family and enjoys trivia, art, fashion, awards shows, and hand-making leather handbags. Her warmth and strength are palpable, and she relies on those qualities each day living with multiple sclerosis (MS).

Tangie grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, working hard to help contribute to her family’s expenses beginning at age 15. She always loved art and fashion and graduated in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in fashion marketing from American InterContinental University. In 2011, she was pursuing her master’s degree in fine art at The Academy of Art University San Francisco when she suddenly lost vision in her left eye.

“I could no longer see or distinguish colors,” she says. “I’ve always been an artist and was getting my master’s so I could not lose my sight.”

Tangie’s ophthalmologist treated her for optic neuritis, a condition where inflammation damages the optic nerve. It can cause temporary vision loss in one eye and is a common symptom of multiple sclerosis (MS). Her ophthalmologist referred her to Emory for an MRI and a visit with a neurologist. There, Tangie was diagnosed with MS.

As a self-proclaimed “nerd,” Tangie began researching to learn as much as she could about MS, but since she and her husband were trying to have a baby, she did not start treatment.

“MS is a crazy thing, and when you’re pregnant, sometimes your body protects itself, and a lot of women feel great during pregnancy,” she explains. “That’s what happened to me. I had a great pregnancy, but after I had my son, my body felt like it was on fire, and my migraines came back.”

Tangie and her neurologist worked together to develop a treatment plan that worked for her. Three years after beginning treatment, Tangie’s neurologist retired, and she found another doctor who changed her treatment plan. At the same time, Tangie started a stressful new job in human resources (HR) and began to experience new symptoms of MS.

“I was doing the work of three people,” Tangie explains. “It was taking a toll on me health-wise, and I started to experience other symptoms. I was 36 and would come home from work with urine on my clothes because I couldn’t hold my bladder. I was dragging my leg. I couldn’t stay up and was no longer productive. That job told me not to come back until I got approval from my doctor.”

That’s when she found the Andrew C. Carlos Multiple Sclerosis Institute at Shepherd Center.

“I was skeptical at first because of my experience with my last neurologist, but from the phone calls to appointments, everyone has been kind and attentive,” she says. “None of the people at Shepherd Center have ever made me feel bad or embarrassed about any questions I ask. All of them have been consistently amazing.”

Now Tangie sees Jacqueline Rosenthal, M.D., at Shepherd. Tangie has a new treatment plan and a renewed focus on taking care of herself. She began finding new creative outlets, namely sewing.

“I knew I could not go back to the workforce, so that’s when I really started taking care of myself, and I learned how to sew,” she says.

She started by taking a class on sewing in zippers and simple skirts. From there, she stumbled on a YouTube channel that taught her how to make a clutch purse. She was immediately hooked, taking inspiration from when she worked as a manager at a Coach store.

“When I took that class, I remembered being in awe of all the details on the Coach bags,” she says. “Everything rushed back to me like, ‘You know how to do this. You love everything about handbags.’ I knew from that point on I had to make handbags, and they had to be leather.”

As driven as ever, Tangie researched until she found a vintage sewing machine that could sew leather and, later, a skiving machine, which removes excess material for two edges of leather that are meant to be joined together. From that point forward, Tangie was on a roll, and she continues to make leather bags by hand. She still receives care at the MS Institute, and the staff she initially met has now become like family.

“I don’t shake when I walk or fall like I used to,” Tangie says. “Shepherd Center has just been so amazing. The nurses there are like my big sisters. I love them from the bottom of my heart. We’ve just been in each other’s lives for so long. They ask about my family, and my family asks about them. You know the saying ‘It takes a village?’ That’s for real.”

You can check out Tangie’s handbag designs on her Instagram at @keane.koi!

Written by Lindsey Rieben