While waiting for my full sight to return, which took about 18 months in all, I saw a macro-biologist my friend Thelma recommended who told me that if my blood test numbers were reversed, I’d have a perfect case of AIDS. I hadn’t a clue as to what AIDS had to do with me, but it shook me enough that I didn’t remember the advice from one of my nursing-school teachers: “The trick is to mobilize anxiety in the patient to ensure compliance.”

My anxiety was mobilized. I complied. He put me on a diet of numerous whole grains and familiar and exotic vegetables cooked no more than three minutes. No meat. No fruit. No sugar or chocolate. I, in my adorable innocence, thought, hey, a month or so of this and I’ll get rid of those five pounds I want to lose, too.

However many months later I stopped—I want to say eight but I suspect I didn’t make it that long; I certainly didn’t make it very long without chocolate, what, are you kidding?—I was THIRTY-FIVE POUNDS HEAVIER and felt worse than ever before. I’d never been that heavy in my life. And while I’d struggled, as many women do, with monthly constipation, my bowels had now ground to a complete stop.

Years later, we figured out that my body doesn’t process whole grains; it stores them. I take Whole Grain Cherrios as a personal affront. My corporeal mass doesn’t like soy, either, but that didn’t stop me from forcing tofu dinners on my family. I can’t even stand the smell of miso soup at this point.

It was during this period that I noticed Tom was taking his daughter “out for a ride” a lot more than usual, with the two of the coming home smelling of (now defunct) Naugle burgers or MacDonald’s fries.

Macrobiotics was no good for any of us.

I went back to eating like a person. Didn’t lose any weight, and didn’t come back to where I’d been before I met Dr. InverseOfAIDS. That’s the thing about MS: there’s no going back. You might figure out how to stand your ground for awhile, but you can never regain what you’ve lost.

Or so it wants you to believe. It’s a lying, capricious little shit of an invasive maggot. I should have known better than to believe anything it said.

Next up: acupuncture and Eastern herbs. By now we’d moved out of the slums of Orange, where Richard Rameriz hid out in the gravel pit behind the complex for a day or two, during which police helicopters hovered constantly and officers could be sited here and there, guns drawn, and every mother found something for her kids to do inside, get in the house, right now, come inside, I mean it, now. We’d also moved out of the sweet apartment where Tom’s brother-by-love slept on our couch Friday nights so he could watch Pee Wee Herman’s Playhouse with his niece and then hurry to the now-defunct Harlequin Theater to do a Saturday matinee and evening show before driving back to San Diego, and where the mother across the way made her son and daughter play together whether they wanted to or not because, she said, after she and her husband were gone, they would only be the only family each other  had.

Wow; a revelation.

But after somebody cased Tom’s van (it wasn’t hard—everyone in the county knew that paint job) and burglarized it while we were out seeing a movie, we moved into a nice duplex in Orange where our six-month-old kitten could run down the long hallway from Lona’s room to the front door, run up the screen to get a good push off, and then speed down the hall to make another turn-around on the bed. Good times. Our biggest problem had to do with our landlord’s contempt for renter’s rights. His popping into our front or back yard whenever he felt like it seemed like a minor issue at the time.

I was by then taking a slew of vitamins and supplements, all expensive, none remembered because their effect was minor at best. The smell of Eastern herbs literally cleared the house whenever I cooked them up, and getting them down my gullet introduced me to the wonderful world of gag reflexes, but I drank/ate/swallowed it all, ever hopeful. Well, mostly hopeful.

Not always  hopeful.

As I lay on the couch one afternoon—my normal position after 2 PM since my functioning hours were severely restricted by then, but I nevertheless still kept working because, damn it! I Was Not Disabled!—it suddenly occurred to me that I knew what our living-room ceiling looked like from every angle. I was low enough at that point to intricately out work a foolproof suicide plan that, thankfully, never got enacted simply because I was too fatigued to get up and do it. But the world, I was sure, and certainly my family, would be better off without me as Public Burden #1.

Fatigued. Yes, I was using MS terminology by then. I hadn’t been formally diagnosed and Mom had yet to pry open that locked vault in the back of her brain, but even an idiot could tell that everything I contended with regularly sounded amazingly just like exactly multiple sclerosis: imbalance, dropping things, sporadically blurred vision, difficulty swallowing, slurred speech, a spine that scoffed at the evolutionary concept of humans walking in the upright position, and fatigue, fatigue, fatigue. Not a need to sleep; a need to go down. A need to stop. And a need to put my finger on whatever thought I was trying to put my finger on and an inability to do so. What was I just thinking? Huh? What? Damn. What?

I was popping supplements as if they were helping. I was getting as much accomplished as possible in whatever time I had before my switch went off, as my husband put it, and I was done for the day, useless thereafter until the next morning. I always felt better in the morning. I was making healthy food and combining my food correctly. I had a positive attitude, damn it. But I could do our taxes three times and come out with three different results—we’d pick the one that showed we owed the least—and I was slowly losing inches of territory every day.

Then, in March, 1994, I had an aortic spasm.

It felt like a heart attack. It started at the end of a long walk, which I took at least once a day to exercise since I no longer went to the gym (let’s don’t go there). It also cleared my head. This particular day my heart started racing halfway through my usual course but I dismissed that, because I was walking to calm my anger, so of course my heart would be racing.

By the time I got to the archway over our front path, I could barely breathe. I literally dropped to my knees and crawled inside, dragged myself into the recliner. My breastbone was trying to shove through my back. The left side of my neck was about to burst, and the pain went down my left arm and all the way down to the left side of my groin.

Tom came in and demanded to know what was going on. I couldn’t talk to answer, but I forced myself to say, “Remedy,” because I also couldn’t allow myself to pass out. I knew the moment I lost consciousness someone would call the paramedics, I’d be transported to an emergency unit, and I’d die. I knew that, absolutely, no question, even as I struggled to contain myself in my body, because a really big part of me wanted to leave so, so badly, right now, isn’t it time? The pain wasn’t subsiding; it was just getting worse.

Tom fed me Rescue Remedy for the next two hours. The next day, I went to the doc-in-the-box around the corner—we were making enough by now for sporadic out-of-pocket medical visits—where the MD on duty determined I’d had a moderately severe myocardial infarction, and hooked me up to an EKG machine to show me just how damaged my heart now was.

It wasn’t. There was no damage. I hadn’t had an MI. It really pissed him off. My heart rate that day, maybe slightly fast, was perfectly normal and my heart murmur couldn’t have caused what I’d described. He was furious—not at me, but furious just the same. Imagine how I felt. I dragged around for over a month before feeling halfway human again.

So… the big news out of that fun adventure was that I had a heart murmur. He’d said it in passing, as if I already knew it, which meant…what? Not a clue. Really, as I look back at all this, when I thought I had some semblance of being on top of things, it’s distressing how clueless I was. It reminds me of the MS Society lunch I went to once, where they handed out a chart that showed what doctors used to think MS was, but now we know better. I couldn’t help thinking that in a few years their happy conclusions would easily be just another line on the chart. But I digress. I went home from the doc-in-the-box and added the new label to the list: Reynaud’s, Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, Probable Multiple Sclerosis, Heart Murmur.

Wheat. Wheat is what’s destroying your immune system, Bera insisted (remember Bera? Sister-by-love? Helped deliver Ilona? Went back to school to become a naturopath?). Wheat and meat. So I became a vegetarian, one that didn’t eat wheat of any kind.

Two years. Didn’t help.

Went vegan for eight months. Didn’t help.

Did a naturopathic detox. Didn’t help.

Did a supplement-based detox. Didn’t help.

Discovered Evening Primrose Oil and the fact that people with MS actually need red meat (thank you, thank you, Lord. Baruch ha’Shem). Helped a little, not enough.

Added a lot of shrimp to help my thyroid. It wasn’t thyroid. I had forgotten that.

By 2000, I was in very much not good shape. I seldom went to parties or to see Tom perform anymore, because I could not tolerate layers of sound, and the ringing in my ears provided the base. I’d had to use a wheelchair to get around the museums when we visited Chicago for Lona’s sixteenth birthday and had once flung myself out of the car in furious tears after Tom made me use an automatic cart to get around Costco.

I used a cane and sat down a lot just so I wouldn’t have to use a wheelchair. Lona got one in the house for an art project, and kept it around just in case. I refused to even sit in it. I couldn’t drive at night at all and “let” my daughter chauffeur me around during the day half the time. Fatigue hung on me like overgrown vines, holding me back, tripping me up, weighing me down. I went on eating binges to salve my depression and took cayenne pepper in capsules to keep the Reynaud’s at bay. I figured I had another couple, maybe five years before the end.

I was formally diagnosed that the year as having chronic progressive (not remitting/relapsing, yeah, what a surprise) by Dr. Stanley Van der Noort of UCI, who saw me on charity after the Multiple Sclerosis Association of America (MSAA) paid for a diagnostic MRI. He talked with me at length because, he said, Reynaud’s and Multiple Sclerosis is not really a good combination. I offered to drop one. He laughed. The point was, with the way my MS was progressing and the severity of my Reynaud’s anything he might prescribe for the one could negatively impact the other, and visa versa.

Van der Noort, whose name I could easily be misspelling, is the one who immediately recognized my non-myocardial infarction as an aortic spasm, and assured me that if I had gone to an emergency room, yes, they would have no doubt been treated me as if I’d had a heart attack and I probably would indeed have died. How fortunate I managed to stay conscious. I should work on that ability, and if it ever happens again, he cautioned, avoid going to an emergency room, because not only were MS and Reynaud’s are not really a good combination, the Mitral Valve Prolapse (renamed from heart murmur) and TOC (re-acronymed from TOS) didn’t help matters.

“Keep taking that cayenne pepper,” was the last thing he said to me.

So there I was, sitting in a rocking chair in the living room of our three-bedroom, one-family house talking to my husband and daughter one fine September, 2000 day discussing something of some import, God alone knows what at this point, when my lungs stopped.

They just stopped.

No in-out, no deep breath, no air movement whatsoever—and, as with my earlier sphincter incidents, no manual control, either. My brain screamed, “BREATHE!” My lungs just said, “Nope.”

A few eternal moments later, they started again, in-out, as if nothing had ever gone wrong, as if they’d never stopped, as if nothing had happened, what was I making such a fuss about?

Oh! I just remembered what we’d been talking about: funeral arrangements in the event of what seemed like my imminent death. And that was before my lungs stopped.

I gave away my clients. I’d been teaching a rudimentary version of how to be a ghostwriter for a few years against the possibility that sometime in the distant future, I would need help.

This was it. My career was over. I was ended.