LATHAM, N.Y.—Tonie Turner stops talking and stares at her hands.

She is holding them out in front of her, palms open and towards her face, as she lifts her neck up from the pillow atop her hospital bed to get a closer look.

“Hey, Mike!” she calls out as she glances at her husband just long enough to catch his eye and then returns to her hands. “Look at that! Look at that — blood!”

They look like regular palms, with a pinkish tinge and riddled with a complex pattern of creases and lines that could either unlock the key to her personality and future or be a collection of idiosyncratic folds of tissue just below the surface of the skin, depending on who is doing the looking.

Turner sees something in between.

“They're red,” she says as she rubs her left thumb all over her right palm, pressing into the flesh.

She looks at her husband again and sighs.

“It's a sign, Mike,” she whispers.

“Yeah,” he says wryly. “Of better blood flow!”

Several weeks earlier, Turner, 51, had been sitting on the sofa in the den of her Mississauga home as she described her life and how she hoped it would change.

That change, if everything went according to plan, would follow her journey to undergo experimental surgery for the multiple sclerosis she has suffered from for more than a decade.

Turner is not your stereotypical MS patient, or at least she does not feel like one, and unless she told you about her symptoms it would be difficult to see that she has any. There is numbness in her hands. She drinks tons of coffee to combat fatigue. She wears sunglasses at work and keeps the lamps low at home because her eyes ache under bright lights. She finds her left leg is weaker than her right.

“Told you,” she laughs as she trips and falls on her way up the stairs. “Left leg went out!”

This is not the kind of life that Turner expected when she first received her diagnosis following an ordeal that began with an accident involving a company vehicle in the fall of 1999.