At 21 years old, Giulia Muzzi sat in a Toronto hospital after weeks of intense vertigo had sent her ricocheting between specialists. She was waiting for her MRI results, which she recalls the doctor delivering gently. There were lesions on her brain, the doctor told her, though they couldn’t confirm the diagnosis and she would need to be seen at St. Michael’s Hospital for more tests only available through the hospital’s specialized MRI machine. In the middle of that conversation, there were two words that kept ringing in Giulia’s ears long after she left the appointment: multiple sclerosis (MS).
She walked out of the doctor’s office and dropped to the floor of the hospital hallway.
“I just cried,” she says. “I thought to myself: I’m 21. There’s no way I have MS. I want to get married. I want to have kids. I want to be a teacher. When I was on the floor of that hospital hallway, all of those things just felt impossible.”
When Giulia walked into St. Michael’s former MS Clinic in 2014, she remembers it being very different than it is now. It was St. Mike’s doctors who confirmed her diagnosis: relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS).
“I felt quite alone and lonely at the time,” Giulia says. “I had no support beyond my family,” she says. “I didn’t know what MS was. I didn’t know how to find other people who had it. And I almost felt ashamed. I kept thinking: how am I going to explain this to people? I didn’t want to be labeled as somebody with a disability.”
Moments of fear turned into moments of hope
Giulia kept the diagnosis within her immediate family and continued her education degree. In 2015, three back-to-back relapses, the worst of which left her with numbness from her stomach to her feet and hands, forced her to confront the disease in a new way. She had, briefly, lost her independence—at an age when her peers were barely thinking about their health at all.
Soon after, the need for community stopped feeling like a wish and started feeling like a necessity, Giulia says. In a casual conversation with a cousin, she landed on an unlikely idea: a fundraising night out. So, Giulia and her cousin booked a small section of the Venetian Banquet Hall in Vaughan. She says they expected, maybe, fifty or sixty people, and even a little money, maybe, raised for MS research at St. Mike’s.
“There was no plan,” Giulia adds, laughing. “It feels like the fundraiser came about by accident.” But that first year, Miles for Smiles was born, and Giulia sold out the event at 180 guests.
The following year, they rented half the hall, with a capacity of 500 people—every ticket sold out. By the third year, attendance had settled into a range it has held ever since: between 650 and 800 guests showing up for an evening built around connection, awareness, and the BARLO MS Centre.
Inside those halls, an incredible community took shape. MS patients who had never met, who had spent years hiding their diagnosis in isolation the way Giulia once had, found each other across a crowded room. Giulia speaks at every gala, sharing her story openly, and every year at least one person finds her afterward to say that it’s their story too, or their mother’s, or their sister’s.
“That’s what I needed when I was diagnosed and didn’t have,” Giulia says. “I was so young and I didn’t know where to turn. I wish I had someone like me, someone who had been through it and could tell me that it was going to be okay. That’s what I’m trying to be for other people now. That’s what Miles for Smiles is.”
10 years of smiling
In the years that Miles for Smiles grew, Giulia’s own life kept moving forward. She completed her education degree, was hired by five school boards as a supply teacher, married her husband in 2019, and navigated a medication change in 2020 when her previous treatment stopped controlling her relapses. In 2021, she and her husband welcomed their first son. In 2024, their second son.
“When I was diagnosed, I thought my life was over,” she says. “And now I have my degree, my career, my marriage, my two boys, and a big, loving village that grows each year.”
This spring, as Miles for Smiles marked its 10th anniversary, the fundraising total from a decade of galas has been tallied: half a million dollars raised for MS research at St. Michael’s Hospital.
It’s a long way to have come for the young woman who dropped to the floor of a hospital hallway, uncertain of what her future held. To anyone newly diagnosed, she doesn’t reach for complicated wisdom.
“It does not define you,” she says. “It’s just a part of your life. You’re going to move on.”
Ten years of inspiring her community—and the family she dreamed of safely in her arms—suggest that Giulia knows exactly what she’s talking about.
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