Two Central Alberta women who flew on the same plane to the same Indian hospital for the same controversial multiple sclerosis treatment have come home in sorely different circumstances.
May Feitsma received the so-called Liberation Treatment and believes she’s seen the first glimmerings of a reversal of her symptoms.
“My feet are now bright pink instead of a bluish colour. My hands are no longer cold, they’re warm.
“My mind was also very foggy at times and I can think clearly now,” Feitsma said on Monday from her home outside of Ponoka, having flown back from India on Friday.
Feitsma, who has secondary-progressive MS, is confined to a wheelchair and is paralyzed on her left side.
But since getting the treatment, she claims to have been rid of nightly headaches, feels more energetic and can now write with her right hand, which she said she has been unable to do for two years.
Noreen Leasak, meanwhile, had her hopes of assistance dashed at the crucial moment, when the angioplasty wires were removed from her body and her Indian doctor informed her he couldn’t find the vein blockages, or stenosis, that accompany CCSVI, the condition associated with MS that the Liberation Treatment purportedly addresses.
“The poor doctor who did me, he was almost in tears that he couldn’t find (the stenosis),” Leasak said on Monday. She returned to her Lacombe home earlier than planned on April 2.
Before going to India, Leasak had been three times to the False Creek Surgical Centre in Vancouver for imaging tests that might find out if she had the vein blockages.
The doctors there told her they didn’t see any, but on the third trip a physician from Poland and luminary in the world of CCSVI told her he could see the blockages and that she should go to India for the treatment.
An all-inclusive trip for two to India, including treatment, costs about $30,000, Leasak said.
The two women arrived back in Canada as the call for immediate government endorsement of the Liberation Treatment reached a new high note in Alberta, with dozens of MS patients and their families protesting on Friday in front of Calgary’s Foothills Hospital.
Feitsma and her husband, Johan, have ready answers for critics who suggest those MS patients who get the Liberation Treatment and claim improvements might be operating under a placebo effect.
“My wife has been on many, many different (medications), and always hoping that it would improve, she never had a placebo (effect) in those instances,” said Johan.
Even Leasak, who came home disappointed and exhausted, remains undaunted about the Liberation Treatment.
And she’s far from down in the dumps about the outcome.
With continued research into CCSVI, she says, “eventually my turn will come.”
mgauk@www.reddeeradvocate.com