Читать книгу Sweet Poison - Janet Starr Hull - Страница 17

CHAPTER 5

Rising from the Graves’

And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

I awoke after a few hours of hard sleep with images of Humpty Dumpty running through my brain. I went over my symptoms for the umpteenth time. Foreboding thoughts ricocheted through my mind. Since no one else could or would, I decided that it was up to me to put myself back together again. I definitely couldn’t turn to my husband for support—he was now avoiding both my problems and me. My parents didn’t even know I was in the hospital: I never told them because of Dad’s health problems. I wasn’t sure how to do it, but I couldn’t resist the pun: I’ll rise from the Graves’. Gallows humor, I grimaced, but any kind of laughter was better than none. My attempts to find humor in my situation helped me to deal with the desperation I didn’t want to feel.

There was only one solution. I had to find the real cause of my condition. I vowed not to make any permanent decision to destroy my thyroid until I had answers. So I made my decision not to make a decision.

In my mind I went over my symptoms one by one. One thing about my condition that was jarring, especially since the doctor said weight loss was a usual symptom of Graves’ disease, was my illogical weight gain. Was it some sort of clue that something wasn’t right about his diagnosis?

I questioned the doctor several times about the inconsistency of my weight gain in relation to Graves’ disease. “Most patients who have a thyroid as overactive as mine lose a lot of weight,” I told him. “They don’t put on thirty pounds.”

His only comment: “Oh, you women! Always worrying about your weight!” I wanted to blurt out what I thought of his patronizing attitude. Instead I kept quiet. “You don’t need to worry about what you look like right now. You need to concern yourself with getting well first.”

“Well” to him meant losing my thyroid gland.

“But, if it’s really Graves’ disease, shouldn’t I be losing weight?” I repeated in hopes of getting an answer. “Instead, I’m gaining weight. This makes no sense.”

I never got him to focus on this clue that something other than Graves’ disease could be causing my symptoms. He continued to insist my only course of action was to grant permission for them to destroy my thyroid. But for me it was a red flag.

Not only my self-image, but my life was changing without my permission, and I couldn’t seem to stop it. I felt as if I had no control over myself anymore. Somehow, it had to stop, I told myself.

I made up my mind that I wouldn’t do anything the doctor told me to do. Expecting to be judged as a defiant child, I informed him, “I am not going to irradiate my thyroid gland. Instead, I’m launching a campaign to find the cause of my Graves’ before making any final decisions.”

“You’re making a big mistake,” he said ominously.

“Perhaps. But it’s my life, and I take responsibility for it.”

Shaking his head, he left the room.

Though he had no interest in symptoms that didn’t fit his diagnosis, he returned to quiz me at least a dozen times about my family medical history. Each time he asked, “Does anyone in your family have thyroid problems or diabetes? Have I already asked you this?”

My repeated reply, “I have no medical history—I am adopted,” didn’t seem to ever register with him. Though my questions to him appeared to get no reaction, he had aroused my curiosity about my absence of medical records and I thought I should try to contact my birth mother to ask her. However, the thought of doing that was a little scary and a little too much to think about at the present time.

Nevertheless, for the time being, I took a big chance defying his advice, elixirs, and pessimistic predictions. But I had to honor my own instincts. I knew that keeping my thyroid gland was the right thing to do. At least until I had more information.

For three days I had laid there with tubes and wires connecting me to IV bags, EKGs, and sterile antibiotic drips. My immune system was so compromised by that point that I developed a serious upper respiratory infection. My blood pressure was too high, as well as my heart rate and cholesterol. Holding my lab results on a chart before him, the doctor asked with a puzzled look on his face, “What do you eat? You look so fit. Your blood levels don’t match up, in my opinion.”

Equally as puzzled, I answered, “Well, a couple of days ago I had tofu for lunch. I always watch what I eat. Because I have been gaining weight this past year, I have been dieting regularly. I never had a weight problem until a year ago.”

“Tofu? You eat tofu but have a cholesterol of three hundred?” he asked suspiciously.

“Yep,” I responded. “I think I’m doing everything right. I watch what I eat, exercise every day, don’t smoke or drink, never eat sweets or crave chocolate. I’m just as confused about this as you are.” It was the damned weight thing again. I knew it was a major factor in this equation. I just couldn’t figure out how it fit in.

“Why am I sick? What’s going on here?” I asked. “Why have I gained so much weight when I am careful about my diet and exercise every day? Plus, I have an overactive thyroid gland! None of this makes sense. There has to be a reason for all this inconsistency. But what? I want some answers! And if you don’t know,” I said to the doctor, “I’ll find out myself. I’ve had enough of lying around in this hospital.”

Expecting an argument, I asked to go home.

He hit the roof. Well, sort of hit the roof for a well-trained doctor. “I disagree adamantly with your decision to go home.” His face reddened. “You can’t go home without doing something about your thyroid. A thyroid as overactive as yours is dangerous.” He ran his eyes over the chart and wielded it like a stick. “Don’t take this lightly, Jan.” He stumbled over my name as if unsure of who I was. “I want you to really think about letting me irradiate your thyroid gland before you go home and possibly die.”

“I can’t,” I answered, a bit perturbed that he wasn’t sure of my name. “I just can’t. Let me go home and I’ll see you next week. I’ll call if I get worse or something.”

Reluctantly, he agreed. Immediately after he left the room, I gathered up my belongings, pulled on my sweats, and prepared to go home. “I hope my car is still in the lot,” I thought with uncertainty. “I drove myself to the emergency room three days ago. I guess I’ll drive myself home,” I murmured.

Before I left the hospital I listened again to the doctor’s warnings and instructions and filled the pile of prescriptions he loaded on me at the hospital pharmacy. I agreed to take all my medicine as directed until my final decision was made. If my thyroid lasted, that was. I also agreed to see him once a week for blood tests. His last words to me were a warning.

“Prolonged use of this thyroid medication could destroy your immune system. Yes,” he told me, his eyes narrowing, “no one really knows the long-term effects of this medication. You need to make a decision about what you are going to do with your thyroid soon, because you could destroy your immune system in a matter of months. Then you’ll really be in trouble.”

I looked at it differently. The doctor had no idea what caused Graves’ disease. He wasn’t sure if the medication would kill me before my thyroid did, and if I did have my thyroid destroyed, he didn’t know what the thyroid supplement would do to me on a lifetime basis. None of the options he was offering me seemed good. So I wasn’t ready to grab at any of them.

I knew I was taking a chance walking out of the hospital, but I also knew that I needed time to find out if there were other options.

With a lurching gait, I stumbled down the hallway to check out at the floor desk. I waited for the nurse to process my final paperwork and, without really focusing, listened to her boiler-plate instructions on what to do when I got home. A few minutes later, feeling tired and weak I stumbled into the elevator and disappeared while she went looking for a wheelchair to push me out per hospital protocol.

Arriving home before Chuck picked the kids up from daycare, I examined my house as if I’d never been there before. Being diagnosed with a deadly disease abruptly changes the way one looks at life, I thought to myself.

Walking into the kitchen, I paused. The familiar smell felt like home. Tears formed in my eyes. Funny how scents can remind you of certain things: family gatherings, favorite meals, good and bad times. I was glad to be home, even though I was a bit unfocused. I tried to calm myself so I could appear normal for the sake of the boys. My husband barely noticed me anyway these days and didn’t seem to care. But the children never saw me wired to tubes while I was lying sick in the hospital. I hoped they never would.

As I stood there galvanizing what little strength I had left, I tried to think through my problem. “I guess I’d better find a way to strengthen my immune system while researching the cause of my Graves’,” I declared out loud. “By becoming physically stronger, I’ll encourage my body to defy the Graves’ and the infections I keep getting. I refuse to surrender my health to anyone or anything!” I wanted to develop a plan to make the Graves’ just “go away,” but I was overwhelmed by trying to figure out where to begin.

I took a deep breath. The best place to start, I told myself, was with myself. I thought about my daily routine and began scrutinizing what I did in a typical day as if looking for clues to a crime. “There has to be a reason why I have Graves’ disease. I’ll simply pick my life apart until I find it. And I will find the reason! I won’t stop until I do.” My heart skipped a beat and began to pound. I must find the answer fast, too, I realized. My thyroid might not last. I might not last.

I opened the pantry door and stood there staring at the packed shelves. I was not sure what I was looking for, but since I’d been steadily gaining weight over the past year, the pantry seemed like a good place to start. As an environmental engineer, I knew a lot about chemicals, so professional curiosity pointed me in this direction, too.

I eyed the boxed foods and began to scrutinize the labels sated with preservatives. I counted numerous vacuum packages of low-fat, sugar-free snacks and boxes of artificially flavored, sugar-free drinks. Hmm. Then I wandered over to the refrigerator and peered inside. Let’s see. There was fat-free, sugar-free yogurt, low-fat processed cheese and margarine, bottles of diet soda, and packaged carrot sticks, which looked slimy. Opening the freezer, I studied the boxes and bags of low-fat, sugar-free diet entrees, frozen veggies saturated with fat-free cheese sauces to help them go down better, fat-free, sugar-free ice creams, and low-fat processed fish sticks.

My thoughts crawled in slow motion now as I tried to analyze what, if anything, was wrong with this picture. I shrugged. Nothing, I thought. I’ve simply been watching my weight by eating fat-free, sugar-free foods. But as I stood there, it dawned on me that I didn’t really know what was inside these “wonder” packages. I began my new investigation by grabbing a piece of paper and a pen from the counter and assembling a list of all the chemicals in my foods. I realized for the first time in my life that proper nutrition in today’s world is not what foods to eat, but what artificial, man-made chemical foods not to eat! I was no dummy, yet I had never been aware of the many chemicals, usually labeled as preservatives, found in just about everything. Maybe it’s the food chemicals making me sick, I thought.

Out of habit, I grabbed a diet soft drink and noticed NutraSweet’s familiar swirl logo on the label. I looked at the ingredients and read the word aspartame. Without hesitating, I sipped the drink thirstily.

Before I finished the soda, however, I developed one of my migraines. That’s when it came to me: the realization that I only started to drink diet soda about a year or so before and that was when all my problems began. Another image came to my mind. A few days before I was hospitalized, I was driving home from the university sipping my usual cold diet drink which I bought every day before leaving campus, and a migraine hit. I had to pull off the road. I became excited. In fact, usually, before I finished the contents of a soda can, I developed a headache. Could the diet drinks be the source of these dreadful headaches? But how? Could this have anything to do with my Graves’ disease?

Then another worry surfaced. If a diet soda could cause me such painful headaches, imagine how sensitive children’s little bodies are to what’s in a diet drink. Oh my gosh, I thought, I’ve been feeding aspartame to my kids!

The more I thought about it, the more the words “fat-free” and “sugar-free” worried me. They were nothing but artificial additives flooding supermarkets. Perhaps fake foods saturated with chemicals did more harm to the body than good.

I walked over to the kitchen cabinet, grabbed another bottle of diet soda and studied the label. Why did I suffer a migraine immediately after drinking a diet drink? A coincidence? I didn’t think so. A due? It seemed possible.

How many chemicals did I eat in a day, I wondered? Even worse, how many chemicals was I unknowingly feeding my children?

I grabbed one of my sugar-free food packages from the pantry and read the label. Natural flavors, aspartame, disodium guanylate, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, disodium EDTA added to preserve color, TBXQ and citric acid in propylene glycol to help protect flavor, the bovine growth hormone, monosodium glutamate, and BHT added to help preserve freshness. I felt sick to my stomach.

Was this why I felt tired all the time, unpredictably moody, dangerously depressed, quick tempered, crampy, bloated, or fat? I didn’t want to be sick anymore. I didn’t ever want to see another squiggly line floating inside my head, exploding into a thunderous headache.

Could the answer be as simple as cutting sugar-free foods and drinks from my diet? Could this stop my symptoms? Banish my Graves’ disease? I didn’t know, but I had to find out. I prayed it was not too late.