Hi all, my wife has progressive MS and has been on ocrevus for 4 years and now needs a metallic valve replacement. Has anyone else been through this? The cardiologist did not know if the surgery will flare the MS…apparently there maybe issues with the blood pressure during the surgery.
Hello and sorry to hear about your wife. Have you asked her Neurologist or MS Nurse about the risks of flaring up her MS?
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It’s tough when you’re under more than one specialism and you ask the ailment ‘b’ doctor what the proposed treatment for that might do to ailment ‘a’ and you get the ‘search me’ shrug. These guys can talk to each other - they possess telephones and multi-discipinary team meetings and all the rest, but sometimes they need a good deal of encouragement to do that. And of course there are some questions for which there maybe isn’t a very good answer and this might be one of those. And if your wife needs the surgery for very strong clinical reasons, as no doubt she does, then maybe it’s just a matter of get on with that and deal with anything else as and when. But it’s a worrying time for you both and it would be good to get some guidance from the experts.
In my very limited experience, the anaesthetist will have thought it through already - mine knew all about my MS when I recently had a GA for something relatively minor and was quoting reassuring statistics about relapse risks to me as I drifted off to la-la land. But as I say, mine was a trivial matter relative to the surgery that your wife is facing.
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Thank you ms community for this. Would it be possible to create an online form for all ms patients who have had open heart surgery to complete so we know how often it flares the ms and how badly and for how long?