Immersed In Hope Multiple Sclerosis Sufferers Go Underwater For Relief

The day’s intense heat had aggravated Beth Dagastine’s multiple sclerosis so much that she could barely walk.

But she managed to wobble up two sets of stairs to an outdoor scuba-diving tank where her husband, Gary Dagastine, and friend Tom Michalski helped her don her gear.

They hoisted her into the tank. For the next hour, the 30 feet of water above her head doubled the atmospheric pressure on her body.

She emerged feeling strong and steady. For the next five days, she walked without the cane she normally uses.

“I walked up and down. Tom was taking pictures. I was crying. I was doing knee bends,” Dagastine said, recalling her first lengthy deep-water dive four years ago. “I was so excited! Everybody takes walking for granted.”

The relief Dagastine experiences from diving is only temporary, but it helps enough that she’s recruiting other people with MS to try scuba diving.

Two of them, Shauna Miller of Hayden, Idaho, and Dave Gilbert of Coeur d’Alene, just completed classes at Tom’s Diving Adventures, which Michalski owns in Post Falls.

About 350,000 people in the United States have multiple sclerosis. There is no known cure, but the disease is not fatal. The Pacific Northwest, particularly Washington state, has one of the highest incidences of MS in the world, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. No one knows why.

Multiple sclerosis is caused by malfunctioning immune cells that attack the body’s nerve cells. The damaged nerve cells have trouble transmitting signals to one another, causing such symptoms that include weakness, difficulty walking and low energy.

The increased atmospheric pressure Dagastine finds underwater forces more oxygen into her tissues, said her neurologist, Dr. Bill Britt of Coeur d’Alene. That increased oxygen stops her immune cells from attacking her nerve cells and temporarily alleviates some symptoms, he said.

The high-pressure treatment, called hyperbaric therapy, is most often administered on land in recompression chambers. The chambers expose patients to different levels of atmospheric pressure.

Hyperbaric therapy is commonly used to treat people with other medical conditions, but some physicians dispute its effectiveness in treating MS.

Dr. J.B. Wilmeth, a physician in Thousand Oaks, Calif., helped study the effects of hyperbaric therapy on MS patients with the University of California in Los Angeles.

“We found no significant benefit of hyperbaric therapy in MS patients,” said Wilmeth, who also sells recompression chambers. “This is off of mainstream medicine.

“I still unfortunately get hate mail from people who want it to work. All we’re doing as scientific investigators is making statements of facts we know to be true.”

The UCLA study examined 40 patients seven years ago.

Studies like UCLA’s are why insurance companies won’t cover hyperbaric therapy for MS patients, Wilmeth said.

Britt concedes that.

“Insurers won’t pay for it, but nevertheless, it’s helpful,” he said, explaining that insurance companies may choose to not cover hyperbaric therapy because other, less expensive treatments for MS exist.

Hyperbaric therapy seems to only work for MS patients who have damage to their spinal cords, like Dagastine does, Britt said. He plans to videotape Dagastine before and after a dive and talk to other physicians about the benefits she experiences.

About four times each month, Dagastine, 53, trades her hot-pink walking cane for hot-pink scuba diving equipment. She leaves the boat on Lake Coeur d’Alene where she and her husband live in the summer and treks over to Tom’s Diving Adventures in their van. Their license plate reads “WOBBLES” - exactly how Beth Dagastine walks because of MS.

At Tom’s, she sinks to the bottom of the 30-foot tank for an hour, breathing an enriched oxygen mixture.

“In Beth’s case, it lessens the spasticity in her legs and improves her balance and speed of walking,” Britt said.

That’s why Dagastine can maneuver so much more easily after a lengthy, deep dive.

“It damn near brings tears to your eyes to see it,” said Gary Dagastine, a Kootenai County sheriff’s deputy who serves on the county’s dive team.

After two weeks of classes, Miller and Gilbert have dived to the bottom of Michalski’s 30-foot tank, explored a boat wreck about 40 feet below Lake Coeur d’Alene’s surface and earned their open water certification for scuba diving.

They say they’ll continue to dive when they can, now that the class is finished. Despite the weakness and low energy that accompany MS, scuba diving is something they can do almost as easily as people without the disability, they said.

“It kind of makes you even with everyone else because you’re weightless,” said Gilbert, 43 and a father of four. “I could stand on the bottom of the pool forever.

“One time I went in here and I was just exhausted, but I went anyway and it revived me,” he said.

Gilbert wants to turn scuba diving into a family activity.

“That’s all he can think about is scuba diving,” said his wife, Laura Gilbert. “We can’t ski together. We can’t do a lot together, so it would be really nice to have something that we could all do.”

The local chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, which Dagastine heads, paid for Gilbert and Miller to take the diving classes.

Scuba diving is complicated. Divers must decipher charts that tell them how long they can stay underwater and how quickly they may surface to avoid getting decompression sickness. The illness, commonly known as the bends, is caused when sudden changes in pressure produce gas bubbles in the blood. It can result in paralysis or death.

Add to that some serious physical limitations and scuba diving can be particularly difficult for people with MS. Beth Dagastine, for all her diving experience, will go only with her husband or her diving instructors.

They all are experienced divers who also know how easily she tires and how little strength she has, she explained.

That first deep water dive into Michalski’s 30-foot tank was intimidating, Dagastine said.

“When I had to go up there and jump in, oh! But I did it,” she said. “Oh, this woman can do anything!”

This sidebar appeared with the story: How to help Beth Dagastine wants to bring a recompression chamber to North Idaho. While there’s a debate over whether hyperbaric chambers help multiple sclerosis patients, the chambers have several other uses, such as treating decompression sickness and helping to heal ulcers and amputation sites. Deaconess Medical Center in Spokane will operate two chambers starting in November, but there is none in North Idaho. Dagastine found a chamber for $160,000 in Florida that she’s researching. And she’s hoping to raise money for other National Multiple Sclerosis Society projects, such as paying for MS patients’ use of local swimming pools. Send donations for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society to 2615 N. Fourth St. No. 505, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83814. For more information, call (208) 664-5675 or (208) 773-9372.