MS patient pins hopes on stem cells

Treatment ‘worth the gamble’

OLIVER Sinclair has lived with multiple sclerosis (MS) for 11 years, and he has the guts to gamble on stem cell treatment which could be fatal.

Next week he starts with procedures leading to the stem cell treatment which will take three months and have a 60 percent chance of curing him of the degenerative disease.

If all goes well, he could recover from some of his disabilities. If the treatment does not turn out to be fatal, he said, “the second worse case is that it doesn’t stop the MS, leaving me in the same boat’.

His disabilities include severe weakness of his right side resulting in a dropped foot and an inability to hold utensils, cognitive problems that can affect conversation, double vision, bowel and bladder problems and heat intolerance leading to severe fatigue.

“I could easily accept fate and be in a wheelchair by February, or take a chance and be able to hold my baby while walking around the garden.

“For that it’s worth more than not trying.”

His wife, Michelle, is due to give birth in February. As the chemotherapy kills sperm, Sinclair had banked his sperm in order for the couple to give their five-year-old son Tyler a sibling.

While Oliver would love to see the stem cell treatment improve all his disabilities, he is realistic.

Top of his list is for his bowel and bladder movements to stabilise, and to be more tolerant of heat.

“When it’s 35ºC and I’m outside for five minutes I need to lie down. It hits hard and it’s nasty.”

Sinclair would like to be is a gamble, Oliver believes he has been gambling with his life by taking medication to slow down the MS that has a 1 percent chance of being fatal.

“Sixty percent is better than no chance,” he said. “All the medicines I have been on will not stop MS, they just slow it down.”

He compared the treatment ahead of him to putting all medicine he had taken, the pain, nausea and side effects, over 11 years into three months. “It’s just a very daunting treatment. There is a lot of discomfort to go through.”

Sinclair had been on a waiting list to have stem cell treatment in Russia in 2018. Friends, family and friends of friends had been rallying to raise the required R500 000.

Then he and Michelle’s research led them to new information that it would be possible at Joburg’s Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre or at the Westville’s Capital Haematology Hospital. They chose the Westville option.

The stem cells involved will come from his own body rather than from a donor.

“Stem cells are harvested after a short two-day chemo session and then reintroduced after a second intensive sevenday chemo session.”

● Sinclair will be blogging about his experience on mtugudzi.wordpress.com. See www.multiplesclerosis.co.za

‘Sixty percent is

PICTURE: NIAMH WALSH-VORSTER WEIGHING THE ODDS: Oliver Sinclair and his wife, Michelle, await radical stem cell treatment to help him in his battle against multiple sclerosis.