Avenue Magazine Edmonton

Robin Giese woke her husband early one morning in 1996 with a few words that would change their lives forever.

“Cliff, I feel different,” she said.

“Are you sick again?” he asked. “No, my head has cleared up,” she said. “It doesn’t feel fuzzy.”

Like a miracle, the sleepy, almost semi-comatose perception of the world caused by multiple sclerosis was gone. It was also the first break in a dark cloud of anxiety caused by not knowing when the potentially fatal disease she’d had for nearly 20 years might strike another devastating blow to her body, shutting her away from others and eroding her ever-diminishing quality of life.

By that morning, Robin was relying on a wheelchair. She and her husband had once loved travelling to warm places together, but Cliff Giese believed those days were completely over. The heat of Hawaii and California and the hassles of flying only seemed to exhaust his ailing wife and exacerbate the growing paralysis caused by MS. extreme fatigue made it tough for her to be involved in activities. Cliff also worried that life had become so difficult for Robin that she had mentally withdrawn. “When a person gets a disease like that, it affects everybody,” he says. “It’s like dropping a rock in water. It affects . . . the children, the husband, the parents, the grandparents, the aunts, the uncles, the friends.”

But an experimental new drug then being developed at the university of Alberta stopped Robin’s disease dead in its tracks. It didn’t reverse the nerve damage already done she is unlikely to walk again — but she did not get worse. And after a few more doses, the treatment also lifted her out of her mental funk. “She was alive again,” Cliff remembers, looking lovingly at the woman he remembers as the prettiest student at NAIT, and who he married 40 years ago this month.

Despite physical limitations that still require the use of a wheelchair, today Robin is as normal as any mother and grandmother could be. She has a busy weekly schedule of exercising at the university, and hosts Wednesday lunches with her five grandchildren. She spends summer weekends at Pigeon Lake and winters at homes in Palm desert, Calif., and Hawaii. She and Cliff go out for dinner almost every night. No longer is she a prisoner of the disease.

And no longer does Cliff — who on the day that Robin rallied was a semi-retired Edmonton business tycoon who founded the Mr. Lube oil-change chain — rue the knowledge that regardless of the many millions of dollars he controlled, he was powerless to help his ailing wife. Soon afterwards, he matched his tough business sense to the dedication and perseverance of a couple of University of Alberta researchers in an 11-year drug-development project that now promises to bring relief to millions of MS sufferers worldwide, not to mention a landmark deal worth half a billion dollars to an Edmonton company.

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