Young waits for the high-dose chemo that would cure his MS

Young waits for the high-dose chemo that would cure his MS

Chris Young, a former computer help-desk technician living in Denver, woke up one morning in June 2004 barely able to move the right side of his body. He felt spasms in the muscles between his ribs and a painful squeezing in his torso. When he tried to walk, he had trouble lifting his right foot. “I was scared out of my mind,” he recalls.

A few days later, an MRI scan confirmed what Young already suspected from looking up his symptoms on the Internet: He had multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic disease in which the body attacks its own nerve fibers. The day of the diagnosis was his 29th birthday.

As his symptoms worsened over the next few years, Young frequently visited Internet forums for MS patients. In October 2007, a forum member described a new clinical trial at Johns Hopkins: Researchers would be testing cyclophosphamide, a chemotherapy drug ordinarily used to treat cancer, on patients with severe MS symptoms.

By now Young had tried every known MS drug and nothing had helped. “I was dropping like a rock at that point,” Young says. “So I figured, what have I got to lose?”

He called the clinical trial’s sponsor, Hopkins neurologist Doug Kerr, and was accepted for the study. On March 13, he was wheeled into Johns Hopkins Hospital to begin four days of intense chemotherapy.

Hopkins neurologist Doug Kerr thought HiCy might “reboot” an MS patient’s immune system, allowing nerve cells to repair themselves. “The ideas was to get rid of the inflammation entirely, in one fell swoop. When the immune system comes back up, we hoped, it would begin to behave better.”

Before the treatment, Young’s abysmal short-term memory had him trapped in a state of fuzziness similar, he says, to what students feel after pulling an all-nighter. His wife would make lists to help him remember even two or three items-and he would promptly forget where he put the lists. Five days after treatment, Young woke up in the middle of the night and “everything was crystal clear,” he recalls. The fog had lifted. “It was the freshest nap I’ve ever had.”

Within a week of treatment, he could stand in a bathtub without having to hang on to the walls. Three months after that, he was walking without a cane.

Read the rest of my article in Johns Hopkins Magazine