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'Don't give up your dreams,' MS patient implores

By Harry Jackson Jr., St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Source: MCT News Service

ST. LOUIS _ It's difficult to tell if Timothy Garrett's greatest triumph was finding that healthy living and medication arrested his multiple sclerosis, or the day he took his first flight in his homemade airplane.

"It was the day before Thanksgiving, 2006, I stepped out of the airplane and I just broke into tears, all emotional," said Garrett, 50. "My dream of building and flying my own airplane gave me power and control over my MS."

His journey to the clouds began in his childhood. "I was a nerdy kid, into math, making model airplanes," he said. "I have trophies from making model airplanes."

In his early 20s, about the time MS strikes most of its victims, his symptoms began _ numbness in his fingers, feet and patches on his skin. He felt fatigued for no reason.

"I thought it was just too much studying," he said.

He graduated from Parks College of Engineering, Aviation and Technology and his career designing airplanes stayed on track.

But his symptoms worsened. He recalls the February day when an MRI detected his MS.

"It was a year after I'd just gotten married; I was still on my honeymoon," he said. "It was devastating."

His doctor told him to expect to be in a wheelchair in 10 years.

The National Institutes of Health says MS damages nerve cells and blocks messages between your brain and body.

"It's an unpredictable disease. It can cause depression, physical problems," said Dr. Florian Thomas, professor of neurology at St. Louis University School of Medicine and director of the National MS Society Multiple Sclerosis Centers at St. Louis University and the Veterans Administration hospitals here.

It's still incurable but due to advances in medicines, "we've changed what MS looks like," Thomas said.

How people respond to the drugs varies, Thomas said. But medication reduces the likelihood of bad results, he said.

Garrett sank into a two-year depression after his diagnosis.

"Cranky would be a nice way to say it," he said. "That's how depression is. You sit around, you don't want to do anything, you have an incurable brain disease and feel sorry for yourself ...

"I became a nasty person. My wife threatened to leave me if I didn't change. I had this ultimatum and I knew I had to turn it around."

For the first few years, Garrett fought the disease by exercising, eating a healthy diet and using the early therapies that eased some symptoms. Then in the early 1990s the FDA approved a drug, Betaseron, which could prevent relapses.

Garrett started the drug and his symptoms stopped getting worse.

"I wasn't depressed any more," he said. "I thought about building my airplane. I said, 'I'm going to do it.' "

With his MS under control, Garrett got a special issuance pilot's license which required a physical checkup every year rather than every two years.

"I started flying again," he said.

Around 2000, his MS drug stopped working. He switched to one of several drugs that were on the market by then.

The same year, he learned of Team Copaxone, a group sponsored by Teva Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer of the drug he used. Team members are people with MS who travel around the country to speak to people with MS.

In 2001, he bought an airplane kit from Zenith Aircraft Company of Mexico, Mo., and worked in his basement "until the pieces got too big," he said. He completed the plane at Creve Coeur Airport.

The day before Thanksgiving, 2006, he took the two-seat, single-engine airplane for its first flight.

Now, when he makes visits for Team Copaxone, he flies in. He tells people that a man with MS built the airplane and flies it.

"I'm not there to tell people to use Copaxone," he said. "They can use something else.

"I'm here to tell them, you can keep this thing at bay if you stay on medications and live a healthy lifestyle. And don't give up your dreams."

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(c) 2010, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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PHOTOS (from MCT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): dreams