an MS Patients’ Story: A miraculous life WITH LDN

Lucretia Roberts Page, Bill Roberts and Amy Roberts Grimes visiting each other before Bill began treating his MS with LDN, and was confined to a wheelchair. Submitted photo

SYLACAUGA — There is no cure for multiple sclerosis.

Bill Roberts of Sylacauga, who was diagnosed with the disease in 1998, is well aware of this, and yet he has managed to live with the disease and remain highly functional, thanks to an unconventional treatment: Low dose Naltrexone.

Roberts was working as a full-time firefighter for the city of Sylacauga on New Year’s Day 1998 when he said his entire side went numb and stayed that way. “I had symptoms going back to the 1970s, but they always went away,” he said. “And I had a younger sister that had it, but back then they said it wasn’t genetic.”

Roberts said at first he “thought I had just been watching football too long. I was at station two at the time, and I called station one to let them know what was going on. Then I went to the emergency room the next morning. The doctor started sticking me with a safety pin. By the time he was done, there was blood just running out of me but I never felt a thing. So he sent me to a neurologist in Birmingham, they did an MRI, and I was diagnosed with MS.”

After being transferred to University of Alabama Birmingham Hospital, Roberts “spent the next three years going down fast. I took all the treatment I could take, but the more I took, the faster the disease progressed.”

He was able to stay with the Sylacauga Fire Department as an inspector long enough to get 10 years of service in for retirement purposes, but was unable to work after that. He also had worked as a landscaper for many years, another thing he couldn’t do any more.

In August 2002 he underwent a six month chemotherapy treatment as an experiment. “Cytoxin is nasty stuff,” he said. “I’d go in Friday, come back out at 9 a.m. and 10 minutes later I’d be throwing up. It took me about a month to get over each treatment, and by then it was time to do it again. The last time, I actually lost 32 pounds in one day.”

The situation got worse in April 2003. Roberts came down with the flu, and since the chemotherapy had effectively wiped out his immune system, he was unable to fight off the disease on his own.

“Any kind of infection, I ended up in the emergency room,” he said. “They thought I had spinal meningitis, so they took me to do a lumbar puncture and hit an artery. They were going to have to transfer me to a private hospital, so they put me on a room on the fourth floor and then forgot about me for the next 17 hours. My wife finally got me to St. Vincent’s, and she stayed with me the whole time, three or four weeks.”

His temperature peaked at 106 degrees, and even after the fever broke, he would be unable to walk for the next two and a half years.

By June 2005, he was catheterized and, due to steroid treatments, his weight was up to 310 pounds. “My doctor said he didn’t know what to do,” he said. “He told my wife I probably wouldn’t make it another 16 months.”

At this point, Roberts met Emily Riser at Lakeshore, who treats MS cases exclusively. “She ran all the tests and recommended another round of chemo.”_Roberts had other ideas. He said he had begun reading about a treatment called low-dose Naltrexone, which had shown some promising results.

The drug itself is designed to fight withdrawal symptoms of alcohol and opiates, which is what it is marketed for. But in small doses, it had also shown promising results in treating a host of maladies, including MS.

“She didn’t recommend it, but I said give me three months and if I don’t see any results, we’ll go back to chemo. I took one and a half milligrams the first two weeks, then three milligrams after that, which is what I’m still taking today. By the end of the first month, I noticed I had more strength, and that I could stand up for more than a few seconds and take more than a couple of steps on my own. When I went back in three months, I walked in on my own without assistance.”

Unfortunately, his sister’s disease was far too advanced to be arrested by LDN. “She was in a nursing home for 20 years before she passed, and she always had a smile. At the end, her bones were so brittle she couldn’t even hold a spoon.”

Roberts’ twin sister moved in with the younger sister in Tuscaloosa and helped “make sure she kept up with everything. She always active in net support groups, and she asked people to send cards from all over the world. She got cards from Israel, from Turkey, from Australia and from every state in the union. She told me she got one card with a stamp on it that cost $5.”