What do you do when the career you love is suddenly taken from you? For Adriana Brangi, the answer was: you find a new way to swim.

In 2020, Adriana was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis — a diagnosis that ended her career as a preschool teacher and forced her to completely rethink what her life and work would look like going forward.

Rather than letting MS dictate her limits, Adriana found something unexpected: freedom in the water. She became a certified scuba diver and discovered that diving gave her a sense of physical control she couldn’t find on land. As she puts it, “When I go into the water, I have full range of motion… everything works better. I’m me again.”

That experience led her to found Diving Beyond MS, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading MS awareness and helping people with chronic illnesses experience the healing and freedom of diving firsthand.

In this episode, Adriana shares her full career journey — from the life she built as a preschool teacher, through the disruption of her diagnosis, to the moment she found a new sense of purpose underwater. It’s a conversation about resilience, reinvention, and what it means to find a new way forward when the life you planned is no longer available to you.

Topics discussed:

• Adriana’s career as a preschool teacher and how her MS diagnosis upended it

• Adapting to life with primary progressive MS

• Discovering scuba diving and the physical/emotional relief it provided

• Founding Diving Beyond MS and its mission

• Advocacy for chronic illness and disability awareness

• Redefining identity and purpose after a life-altering diagnosis

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