CALGARY- They began as an unlikely pair. Two young women, living a world apart, not knowing that their lives would soon be ravaged by a disease without a cure.
Karen Malcolm was living in London, England, while Fiona Sparrow worked in Alberta as a long haul truck driver.
“I woke up one day, and I had really bad double vision,” Malcolm remembers. “Really bad double vision, and it wouldn’t go away.”
“From step one I couldn’t see, my balance was all gone because of that, and you just get weak,” she explains, adding her disease progressed quickly. “You’re just getting sucked away. I was so neurologically challenged, sometimes I had to get carried because I couldn’t even sit in a wheelchair.”
The 35-year-old was told her immune system was attacking her brain stem. She was suffering the devastating effects of multiple sclerosis (MS), an inflammatory disease which affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.
Around the same time 32-year-old Fiona Sparrow’s system was being pummelled by recurrent, all-out attacks. She was also diagnosed with MS.
“I would get to a plateau, and then it would get worse again,” she says. “And then in ’09, I ended up paralyzed.”
Both women soon came to realize that their days were numbered.
“I was totally too comfortable with that situation,” Malcolm says. “I was way too comfortable with the fact that I was absolutely dying.”
Sparrow’s doctors gave her drugs, steroids and powerful chemotherapies, but soon ran out of options.
“I was dying and I knew I was dying. I’d been told I was dying,” she remembers.
But incredibly for the two women, their stories didn’t end there. A research team lead by Dr. Mark Freedman in Ottawa has been experimenting with a groundbreaking procedure called an autologous bone marrow transplant. Since 2000, about 30 patients with aggressive MS—including Sparrow and Malcolm—have taken part, with life-saving results.
The aggressive, painful and dangerous therapy involves stem cells, bringing patients to the brink of death in order to give their immune systems a complete reboot. It worked for both Sparrow and Malcolm, who have since become friends. Both are now off of medication, and Sparrow, who used to be paralyzed, now works out at the gym.
Doctors caution that the procedure is not a cure for everyone with MS, as it’s dangerous and does not reverse the permanent damage caused by the disease. It also makes patients incredibly sick.
The Ottawa team’s research is expected to be published this summer.
Tomorrow, we’ll have more details on how the treatment works, and what patients go through to fight their illness.
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