CBC News – By early December of last year, Susie Silvestri was no longer able to walk or speak.
She hadn’t eaten for days.
The 70-year-old American found herself in the vice-grip of her rapidly progressing ALS — a disease that causes gradual loss of muscle control.
She was begging doctors at the Moose Jaw, Sask., hospital for a feeding tube, but they said no because her U.S.-based insurance company wouldn’t pay the bill.
“I think they just robbed her because they had no way to take care of somebody in her condition.”
“Nervous and scared,” she texted her brother Charles Silvestri with her one good hand. “This is not what I ever thought my life would look like at this point.”
Susie had come to Saskatchewan from North Carolina three months earlier, chasing the promise of healing offered by Dayan Goodenowe and his Dr. Goodenowe Restorative Health Center in Moose Jaw.
It’s a private, unregulated facility that claims “a 100 per cent success rate in stopping the progression and in restoring function of people with ALS.”
Goodenowe maintains that every person who enrolls in the program offered at the centre leaves in better condition than when they entered.
In her desperation, Susie put her home up for sale to pay the $84,000 US fee.
But former Goodenowe employees say that as her condition worsened, Goodenowe centre management left Susie to fight for her life on her own — she had to hunt for an American hospital that would install the feeding tube and find a way to get there …
