Persistence pays off

ST. JOHN, Wash. — Becky Dickerson didn’t think much of it. In fact, she and her friends just laughed it off.

There she was, 18-years-old and driving to the lake with some pals when she went blind. It was a “hazy, glowy” blindness, Dickerson recalls. She could see light and faint shapes. But that was it.

In a matter of hours her vision returned.

Looking back, Dickerson, now 36 and living in St. John, thinks that was an early sign of multiple sclerosis.

“I believe that was my first flare,” she says.

She had more strange symptoms over the years. Then she had three children in eight years: With each pregnancy, the symptoms subsided.

And then two summers ago, MS hit her hard.

She couldn’t walk without a cane. She had constant vertigo.

She received an infusion of steroids to stem the attack. And then she tried a newly released drug called Tysabri to prevent another flare. The drug is given intravenously once a month.

Dickerson says she felt great.

“It seemed like a miracle to me,” she says.

The next month Dickerson opened the newspaper and learned Tysabri had been pulled from the market. She was five days away from her second infusion.

“I threw a fit,” she says. “And cried. I felt so frustrated. I really had the rug pulled out from under me.”

Tysabri has been linked to a sometimes-fatal brain infection called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, or PML. At least one patient died from the illness. Just this month, the Food and Drug Administration decided to allow Tysabri to return to market, as long as patients follow a careful screening process before going on the drug.

Doctors are awaiting final approval of the safety program – which likely will come in the next couple of weeks – before giving Tysabri to patients again, says Dr. Roy Kanter, medical director of the Holy Family Multiple Sclerosis Center in Spokane.

Despite the risks, Kanter says he has patients who would go back on the drug in a heartbeat.

“Absolutely,” he says. “We are just keeping them informed on a regular basis as to what the status is of the FDA’s approval process.”

Patients will receive Tysabri only if they have not tolerated or not had success with other drugs. And they will be followed carefully while taking Tysabri, Kanter says.

“We’re going to want to have close contact and quick contact,” he says.

Dickerson, though, is not one of those patients who’s desperate to go back on Tysabri.

After hearing about Tysabri being pulled, she started doing some research.

It’s part of her nature to be resourceful. She learned to adapt as an Air Force kid, moving from base to base.

Then she spent her young adulthood in Spokane, graduating from Shadle Park High School in 1988 and getting a journalism degree from Eastern Washington University.

She figured she would work at a newspaper somewhere, but then she fell in love with a wheat farmer from St. John.

When she moved to the small farming community, there wasn’t a newspaper, so she started one in 1994. The Community Current now has 1,000 subscribers, half of them from outside St. John.

Coming to the newspaper building each day to work on the monthly paper helped her get through even her sickest times, she says.

“When you’re in a storm like that, all you can do is persevere,” Dickerson says. “It kept my sanity… . Every day I had somewhere to go.”

She brings her three girls – 8-year-old Gracie, 5-year-old Glory and 3-year-old Roxy – to the office each day. The play on the hardwood floors of the large 1920s building, once a combine-repair shop.

“It’s been good for them to see a mom who applies her passion,” she says.

In her research, Dickerson read about another MS drug, Copaxone. Like Tysabri, it works to prevent relapses. But it is much less risky.

Many patients cannot tolerate Copaxone’s side effects, which range from swelling and itching at the site of the injection to nausea and muscle stiffness. But Dickerson, who has been taking it for nearly a year and a half, says she has not suffered any.

And she hasn’t had any major MS flares since she began the daily injections.

She has no regrets about her experience with Tysabri, she says, but is glad she found a drug that works for her.

“I used to think I’d want to be a pioneer woman and live on the Oregon Trail,” she says.

“Had God placed me on this world 100 years ago, I’d be crippled.

“We really live in a remarkable time. Think about how technology has made life better.”