Back into the swim
Grainne Pierse pushes aside serious illness to compete
It has become routine to see one or more of the five swimming Pierse sisters competing at the Kinsmen Sports Centre.
Starting nearly 20 years ago, Annamay, a 2008 Olympian, Hanna, Grainne, Fionnuala and Patricia, have all churned out the laps at the river valley facility.
That Grainne won a gold medal in the 50-metre backstroke and a bronze in the 50-metre butterfly Friday night at the Canada West swimming championships wouldn’t raise eyebrows for most observers, either. The four oldest sisters all either swim for the University of British Columbia, or have done, and young Patricia is headed there, as well.
What is remarkable is that less than eight months after a surgeon broke her sternum, opened Grainne up and removed her thymus gland, the 21-year-old science student is competing at all.
Grainne suffers from the neuromuscular disease myasthenia gravis, an auto-immune disorder with no known cause or cure.
“If you like, every nerve we have has a little package of juice that it releases to make the muscle work,” said Dr. Patrick Pierse, Grainne’s father. “The antibodies in this disease attack that, so essentially it stops the nerve making the muscle work. And that can affect many and all muscles in the body.
“As a result, the patient just becomes weaker and weaker and doesn’t know why.”
The disease can be managed through medication, and a thymectomy can help alleviate symptoms, or sometimes produce complete remission. But first the condition needs to be accurately diagnosed. That can be tricky.
In the fall of 2009, all Grainne knew was she felt awful for no apparent reason.
“I started getting headaches all the time, and I was just always very tired,” she said. “My left eye started drooping, I couldn’t hold eye open anymore. I was too tired to even smile all and I’m a person who is always smiling.”
She spent a week in hospital as a result of that episode, but tests produced no conclusive answers. A neurologist believed it was myasthenia gravis, but couldn’t prove it until the symptoms returned.
Almost exactly one year later, they did.
“This time it came back a lot worse,” Grainne said. “Everything went downhill. I got a little bit better for a few weeks, then I had another even worse episode at the beginning of November where I wasn’t able to stand up by myself, couldn’t walk at all, couldn’t talk, because it was too hard to actually push words out, so my speech was slurred.
“I couldn’t go to classes, couldn’t do any reading because I couldn’t keep my eyes open, couldn’t keep my head up by myself.”
Coincidentally, Grainne’s condition worsened at about the same time that Annamay contracted dengue fever at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India.
Patrick and Johanna were understandably preoccupied with Grainne’s worrisome situation, so much so they feel a tad guilty for not providing enough sympathy to Annamay and her battle with dengue fever.
“The thing is, we fell apart, and she just stayed positive,” Johanna Pierse said of Grainne. “She’d say, ‘It’s a little setback, things will be fine.’ She kept us going because she was so positive.”
A treatment known as IVIG (intravenous immuno-globulins) helped get Grainne through the 2010-11 school year.
“Any time, I have a flare-up, I have to go sit in hospital for four hours and get this IV drip,” Grainne said “Nobody is really sure how it works, but it’s really good.”
Still, the consensus was a thymectomy would further improve her condition, so a date was set for that procedure.
Within weeks, Grainne was splashing around, gently, in the Pierse’s outdoor pool. Last August, she spoke to her Edmonton Keyano Swim Club coach, Steve Price, about resuming serious training. Price had just taken the job as head man with the UBC Thunderbirds and Dolphins team in Vancouver.
When she told Price she wanted to compete this year, he was openminded, but realistic, telling Grainne he wanted her on the team. But if it proved too taxing, he wanted her involved as a coach or a manager, perhaps.
“She’s a very bright girl, and she knows herself very well,” Price said. “We agreed we wouldn’t focus on what she couldn’t do, we’d concentrate on what she can.”
Grainne knows it is “no longer reasonable to think I”m going to be an Olympic athlete one day.” She is completing a cluster of courses that are prerequisites for entry to a veterinary college in Saskatoon.
She also knows her body will not cope with twice-daily workouts or distance work in the pool. She trains once a day, not twice like her teammates, and focuses on sprints — the 50-metre freestyle, backstroke and butterfly.
Still, in December, at her first official competition this season in Seattle, Grainne qualified for the Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) Nationals in the 100-yard backstroke.
“The big surprise wasn’t that she was able to get back to the level she was at, but that she could get there so quickly,” Price said. “The surprise was she could actually surpass her previous performances.”
True to form, Grainne remains upbeat, just as she was last August when, not long out of surgery, she told her coach she was determined to get back in the pool and get back at it.
“I don’t know, that’s just kind of who I am,” Pierse said. “Things don’t ever really get me down that much. And if you get upset over something like this, then I was going to be upset for a long time. It’s something that’s there now for the rest of my life, so there’s no point getting upset over it.
“You can’t change it.”