A procedure MS patient Amy Preston describes as "easier than having my teeth cleaned" has put a new bounce in her step.

After 15 years of deteriorating health, Preston has experienced quite the opposite since having an angioplasty performed on her neck veins to improve blood flow. Treatment took place on Oct. 18 in Albany, N.Y.

It's only been three weeks since the 40-minute procedure that involved inserting a tube in a vein in her groin and guiding it to her neck veins, where a balloon was inflated to reopen collapsed walls.

Since then, the improvements have been incremental but nevertheless noticeable to Amy and her family.

For one thing, she joined her husband Mike on a walk outside and didn't have to lean on him for support to go around a block. In fact, she felt so strong, they went around two blocks.

"I can see the street from our window and we've been here four years, but I never walked that far before," Amy Preston, 47, said during an interview with The Recorder and Times on Monday.

More telling, on their return to the house from another walk, she went upstairs without using the handrail for leverage "for the first time in a gazillion years."

It's something their teenaged children Mack and Allison have never seen before. Nor are they familiar with a stronger voice their mother employs while singing with the radio and calling for them in the house.

Meanwhile, her hands and feet are warmer, the benefit she believes of improved blood circulation, and she has regained long-lost sensation in her feet that revealed her shoes were too big and her socks too lumpy.

"These are little things that wouldn't mean anything to other people, but they mean a lot to me," she said.

It took a couple of days before Preston noticed any changes and what has happened since occurred gradually, she said.

Moreover, she has no way of knowing if the improvements are long-lasting or if any more will follow.

What's more, her exhilaration is tempered by the realization that many Canadian MS patients can't pay to go out of the country for a procedure specifically unavailable to them here.

"I was convinced this was the right thing to do, even before I went to Albany, and now I'm even more convinced.

"I'm excited, but I feel bad for others who can't afford this."

It is a point Preston has made previously on her way to becoming a champion to have the procedure approved for clinical trials in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada.

Venoplasty is a procedure routinely performed on people with blocked neck veins called chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI) that received international attention last year when Italian doctor Paolo Zamboni reported unexpected benefits to MS patients.

Preston has been a vocal proponent of clinical trials in Ontario and Canada and has been supported by Leeds- Grenville MP Gord Brown and MPP Steve Clark.

But the response from government leaders has been tepid at best.