Leaving the Clinic - the Final Morning

On the evening of 9th April, my partner Helen was due to arrive in Moscow and to come to the clinic to visit me. After 30 days without seeing her in the flesh, this was something I was really looking forward to. However, as fate would have it, her flight from London was cancelled and she had to get an evening flight that meant that she arrived at the hotel Vega at 05:30 on the morning of April 10th. She managed to couple of hours in bed for having to get herself together and come and visit me in the clinic.

When she did arrive, dressed in all her blue clinical overrobes, it was still fantastic to see her. She was able to look around my room and see it for real having seen it so often on the videos that I have been recording. After a short wait and look around the clinic, we finally got to see fellow Dr Fedorenko in his office for his final debrief.

The meeting with Dr Fedorenko was a good one, primarily because the stats that I had produced in isolation were particularly good. He was happy enough to say that my MS was 100% gone, and with a good attitude, the right healthy food and good exercise, I was in a really good position for it to stay that way.

Of course, it's always possible to accurately predict the future and whether those pesky little cells might reappear will clone themselves and start the whole process again. But, for the time being, things were looking really good. My MS was "gone" in a way that it wouldn't have been if I had been on disease-modifying drugs back at home. 

Dr Fedorenko gave me my MRI results as well as a CD with those results on and all the necessary paperwork and discharge notes. Part of the paperwork was a detailed analysis of exactly what the team has done that I could show to my neurologist back at home.

Without having had any complications, my discharge treatment regimen was particularly straightforward. I didn't need any drugs, just the usual monitoring of my bloods through regular blood tests, a few visits to my GP for checkups and slightly more regular neurologist appointments and MRIs.

All said and done, a successful treatment at the clinic and one that I will remember forever. The big hope now was that I was a "responder" rather than a "failed responder" or a "non-responder". With my stats in the right place, hitting this thing early, having a low EDSS score before treatment, I was in the best place for this treatment to work and I am hopeful, truly hopeful that it has worked and will have halted the progress of my MS.