Dealing with Healing 


Having had a lifetime of practice, Jim reflects on staying well . . . within the limits of a couple of chronic conditions. 

The last couple of years I've had a slowly dawning epiphany. I really am sick, but I'm healthy—for ME!

During my teens and early twenties, I was totally convinced that I had heart trouble. The doctors were equally convinced that I was a bothersome, neurotic kid. Here's a typical episode. I'm in bed asleep, say in 1954. This is a 10th grader we're talking about. I wake up and feel strange. My heart starts to beat stronger and faster. It goes into tachycardia. It goes on and on. I'm scared. On top of this there is an occasional skipped beat, and when the heartbeat returns, it hurts for a second. I wake my mom or my dad. On one occasion, my dad actually goes for a walk with me in the middle of the night, trying to calm me down. We go to this doctor and that. The doctors have nothing to offer. "Your heart is functionally normal." "There is nothing wrong with your heart." They put me on barbiturates in the 50s and 60s and valium in the 60s and 70s. Eventually, I went on to accept my limitation and lead a reasonably successful life.

Decades roll on, science advances, I continue to have an occasional heart episode, and then when I am 63, I end up in the emergency room with chest pains. More tests. Nuclear resonance, CAT scans, diferidimine EKGs, the whole, expensive works. Two specialists now pronounce a new truth. I have pulmonary hypertension. Now this is not a disease you want on your wish list, even as a hypochondriac. The blood pressure in my pulmonary artery is elevated, and that can cause my right heart valve to leak blood. The primary kind can kill you in a couple of years. Now I'm saddled with two "diseases"—gout and pulmonary hypertension—that are damn near impossible to explain to a layman and just kind of a pain in the part.

Other than finally coming up with a diagnosis after 50 years, the doctors can't say for sure what caused this. SOMETHING HAPPENED in the course of my life to cause chronic pulmonary obstructive disorder (COPD). No one is quite sure what. Was it the lung damage that may have occured from a difficult birth? Was it the severe childhood asthma and allergies, or were those symptoms? How about the ten years of smoking from age 21 to age 31? Or all the intense secondary smoke I inhaled as a working musician in smoke-filled, stuffy bars and night clubs? Was it the vials and vials of prednisone I've had to take all my life to alleviate the OTHER chronic condition I have, gout? They just can't say.

Once the diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension was given, I began to reconstruct my life and to understand how very much the precursors of this disease, which were present from very early, affected what I could call "being healthy." My dad was a strapping man who could muscle two concrete blocks up a ladder as he was building his own grocery store. That kind of labor just made me sick. People were always chastising me for my lack of aerobic exercise. I never could, still can't do aerobic exercise. When I first came out in the 1970s, my gay friends could dance all night. I never could manage more than 20 minutes on the dance floor, or in bed for that matter (blush). People have been forever becoming disappointed with me for a limitation that I can't really help. But I forgive them. And I proclaim that I am healthy for ME.

And what about that OTHER chronic condition, the gout? Another damned pain in the butt, or foot. Back before they had more decent and less harmful drugs, gout was a true affliction. I can remember during my twenties literally wishing my foot could be cut off to alleviate the pain. I've written about my self-discovery around the gout at length in other places. I do have gout, but it is atypical—which apparently is the only typical thing about my illnesses. Most people who have the gout have elevated uric acid levels, and that is how the doctors treat it: with medication to reduce the uric acid level. Nearly all the time, my uric acid level is not elevated, yet I still have gout attacks.

I can say with absolute certainty, however, that while medicine has been responsible for alleviating my pain when it became unbearable, it is I who can take the credit for developing a healthy lifestyle within the parameters dictated by the disease. It is I who gradually discovered that how I live my life—how much water I drink, how much of certain meat and vegetables I eat, how much rest I get, how healthy I stay otherwise, how much liquor I drink—dramatically affects how much time I spend with my foot up in the air.

Now I didn't spend my life or part of it in a wheel chair, or blind, or deaf, or crippled from wounds received while defending my country or being hit by a drunken driver. If I had one of those conditions, people wouldn't have labeled me a hypochondriac. They, yes, even the government, would have helped me build my life under limited conditions. But as it is, I had to do it all myself, with the help of a few doctors. I had to define what was healthy for me, against some pretty amazing odds, and I had to stick to my guns. I did it. I have been healthy for ME, and I will stay healthy for ME until the day I die. 

Posted: Thu - February 2, 2006 at 09:42 AM          

©