Source: Fort Wayne.com

Life sometimes requires you to take gambles.

Two weeks from today, Mikey Riley will take a big one. He will leave for China to undergo stem-cell treatment in the hopes of controlling his multiple sclerosis.

The American doctors Riley talks to have only negative things to say about the treatment, but Riley looks at it this way: He has an aggressive form of MS that could leave him completely paralyzed in a few years. His insurance won’t cover treatment in the U.S., and although he’s raised a lot of money, he doesn’t have nearly enough money to start treatments here.

So he’s taking a $23,000 gamble, and the worst thing that can happen is that it won’t work, he says.

For Riley, his condition first reared its head when he was 15. He suddenly went blind in one eye for a month.

The problem was misdiagnosed, though. Not until two years later, July 2005, four weeks after he graduated from high school, was it determined he had an aggressive form of MS, something called Relapsing-Remitting MS.

Riley had already enrolled in the Great Lakes Maritime Academy, but handling all the drugs he had to take, handling the insurance, giving himself regular injections and finding ways to get to the hospital when he needed to, proved too much. He quit and returned home, where he enrolled at IPFW.

After one semester, though, the MS flared up, and he was bedridden for four weeks. Again, he had to quit school.

Meanwhile, the treatment of his disease depressed him. Life seemed to be full of guessing games on which drugs to take and which drugs to match them with, and it often took months to determine whether the new mix worked. The drugs came with side effects, he said, such as depression and personality changes, which required more medications to treat.

Riley needed a permanent solution. He needs a stem-cell transplant. Doctors would use chemotherapy to wipe out his immune system and then introduce a new one using stem cells. But Riley’s insurance wouldn’t pay for it. Four times, he said, he was rejected.

So Riley launched his own fundraising campaign, relying on guidance from the National Transplant Assistance Fund, a national organization that helps by listing people’s stories on an Internet site. His goal was to raise the $90,000 he needed up front to start treatment.

Then his father asked him: Are you open to other stem-cell possibilities? He asked him to keep an open mind.

Not long after that, Riley learned of the treatment available in China. Before long, he’d made up his mind.

Riley has paid $23,000 in advance for treatment. On May 17, he leaves for China, where he will remain until late June.

If the treatment works, it won’t cure his MS. Instead, it will enable his body to replace the myelin, which insulates the nerves that are destroyed by the disease. It isn’t a permanent solution, either. Years from now, he may have to have the procedure repeated.

“It’s been medically successful in a lot of people,” Riley says. “I’m young. I have aggressive MS. I want to do everything in my power to stop it.”

“At worst, it won’t work,” he says. “I have nothing to lose except the money I’ve raised.

“If it works,” Riley says, “there’s no way I could ever keep quiet about this.”