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The announcement of a new multiple sclerosis (MS) clinic in Regina is bittersweet for one woman who has been getting care for the disease for over 20 years.
Bonnie Gorski said she wishes the funding would have come decades earlier.
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“I worry about my own children,” she said. “If they were to be diagnosed with MS, they would wouldn’t end up in a wheelchair like me, because there would be a facility right there helping them.”
The provincial budget set aside $2.3 million for a new MS clinic to serve the Queen City and southern Saskatchewan.
“I think it’s long overdue,” Gorski said, about the funding.
“I think with all the disease-modifying drugs that are out there now and all the knowledge we have now about it, it can help those young people that are being diagnosed now.”
The Regina woman said it can be incredibly challenging and fatiguing to travel to the only other provincial MS clinic in Saskatoon.
With the clinic 240 kilometres away from her home, Gorski said some of her care was left to “fall by the wayside.”
“Maybe if I would have had a community where you could go and meet other people — and meet people who are studying MS specifically — it would have helped me a lot,” she said.
MS Canada said that Saskatchewan has some of the highest rates of the disease diagnosis’ in the country and the world.
MS is a progressive neurological disease of the central nervous system which includes the brain, spinal cord, and optic nerves.
Getting to the Saskatoon clinic would mean Gorski’s husband would have to take the day off work to drive her, which wasn’t always feasible and could be expensive.
Gorski said she has a great neurologist and care team, but having access to specialized MS care in Regina is something she wishes was around when she was first diagnosed.
“I’m really glad that a MS clinic in Regina will be opening, because these newly diagnosed people need the support,” she said. “Not only support with medication, but diet and mindset as well and physical therapy.”
The senior director for the Prairies with MS Canada, Mona Bates, said she was pleased to see another clinic in the southern part of the province.
“Having a second clinic in the south really makes it a lot more accessible for people to come in for their specialist appointments,” Bates said.
She said about 4,000 people in Saskatchewan are living with MS.
The new clinic can include specialized medical professionals like neurologists and nurses who have training for MS, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and psychologists.
“MS is a very complicated disease because it affects everybody differently, so the symptoms can show up very differently for each person,” she said.
“You need specialists who are trained to understand this and can recognize the symptoms.”
No information has been released yet on when the provincial government plans to build the facility.
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