Personal Perspective: Doreen

By Nick Perry

When Doreen Schofield started having difficulty walking in her high-heel shoes and her vision became blurred she wondered what was wrong.

The former office worker from Howick was 28 at the time - but because tests were not advanced in the 1960s, it was a further 11 years before she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.

The incurable disease, which interrupts messages getting from the brain to some nerves, slowly took hold of her life.

She suffered long periods of utter fatigue, and found simple things such as balancing and knitting, increasingly difficult.

"People look at you in a peculiar way. I would be walking to work and they would think I have been drinking in a pub somewhere."

Determined to remain independent, Doreen Schofield refused to use even a walking stick for years. But she was eventually forced into a wheelchair, and later found her office job and Brownies leadership too much to cope with.

Now Doreen Schofield works tirelessly to raise money for fellow sufferers, and is asking people to give generously during Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Week, which starts today.

The week coincides with the Health Funding Authority saying it is paying for a patient with special circumstances to receive beta-interferon treatment. But the news is of little comfort for most sufferers, who have been waging an unsuccessful four-year battle with Pharmac to subsidise the $20,000-a-year treatment widely.

The Authority's general manager of personal health, David Moore, refused to elaborate on the "special circumstances."

Patients had to show the drug had made a major improvement in their life or dramatically reduced pain before the Authority would consider paying, he said.

The chairman of Parliament's health committee, Brian Neeson, said it was unacceptable that the 4000 or more sufferers in NZ could not get free treatment when patients almost everywhere else in the world could.

But Pharmac general manager Wayne McNee said clinical trials had shown the drug was of limited effect and helped perhaps only 20 to 30 per cent of sufferers.

* Instant $10 donations can be made to the Multiple Sclerosis Society by ringing 0900 Yes 2 MS (0900 937 267).

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