STELLARTON – Last spring, if the police had pulled Yvonne Andersen over and asked her to walk heel to toe in a straight line, they would’ve thought she was drunk with the way she staggered and stumbled.

In reality, Andersen has MS. She wasn’t able to walk a straight line, suffered from cognitive problems and couldn’t walk backwards.

”I was close to needing a cane, but was too vain to get one,” she told a group of 30 people gathered for a Pictou County MS Support Group meeting at the Nova Scotia Community College in Stellarton Friday.

“So I stopped going places. When I went grocery shopping, I hung onto the cart. I couldn’t walk across my lawn without stumbling over my feet, so I didn’t.”

She was in constant pain from her MS symptoms and popped pills like they were candy to try to control it; the pain had grown so severe she had to resign from her job.

Then she heard about the liberation treatment, the Truro resident said, and from that moment she became “obsessed” with finding information about the procedure.

In July, she travelled to Albany, N.Y., and had the treatment done. Doctors inserted a catheter with a camera attached through her groin and threaded it up her body until it reached a blockage in her chest.

“I kind of figured I had a blockage there – I had the ‘MS Hug’ you hear about,” she explained. “It’s a tight banding around your waist, it feels like you can’t take a deep breath and I had excruciating pins and needles on my left side.”

The doctor used a balloon to open the vein. While some MS patients who have received liberation therapy described the ballooning as a painful procedure, all Andersen noticed was the pressure.

“It was like someone was standing on my chest,” she said.

The minute the ballooning was done, however, the MS hug went away as well.

Two further blockages on the left side of her neck were opened and a narrowing of the veins on the right side of her neck was addressed.

Andersen was lucky – she didn’t need stents, which have become a heated topic in the already-controversial procedure. Stents are placed inside a vessel to relieve an obstruction. Recently, an Ontario man who had the treatment in Costa Rica was denied follow-up care in an emergency room at home and told to go back to Costa Rica. By the time he raised enough money to go back, a blood clot that formed below his stent had grown bad enough to kill him.

Andersen, who calls herself an advocate for the procedure, urged the people who attended the session to do their research and make informed choices about the treatment. She’s also participated in a protest in Halifax last month and spoken to Health Minister Maureen MacDonald, who has promised her that no Nova Scotian who has had the treatment will be denied care afterwards.

Three hours after Andersen received the liberation treatment, she could walk down the hallway of the hospital heel to toe and was capable of walking backwards. Two weeks later, she was able to ride a bike – something she hadn’t done in five years.

“I had 18 different issues before the procedure and most of them are gone,” she said. “Some reoccur, depending on what I’ve done during the day, but I’ve been able to stop all of the pain medications I’ve been taking and now I just take two Tylenol a day – that’s amazing to me.”

A follow-up appointment in Ontario in October showed that Andersen’s veins have remained open.

“I still have MS. I still get tired, sometimes I have problems with my balance. But I’m doing 10 times what I was doing in my other life,” she said.

So far, approximately 125 Nova Scotians have had the liberation procedure done.

http://www.ngnews.ca/News/Local/1969-12-31/article-2055315/Advocate-for-controversial-MS-treatment-urges-people-to-get-informed/1