One summer, about thirty years ago when I was 29 years old I came face to face with the unknown. As most 29 year old men I felt like I was invincible, that I was King of my own domain. Although I had the usual colds or occasional flu I always bounced back quickly. I considered myself healthy and strong.
However, over that summer I began to feel something strange taking place within my body. I had started feeling very tired. After about three weeks of this I was concerned that I was not getting over it as quickly as usual. Then the constant fevers started and after getting a glimpse of myself in a mirror I was surprised by what I saw. I am full blooded Italian and have always had that olive “always tan” complexion. But when I looked in the mirror I saw a sickly yellow/green face instead.
I was known as a self-motivator and self-employment seemed to work best for me. I owned a mobile billing service and always took the responsibility of providing for my first wife and two young sons. Even though I was feeling worse as the days went by, I still had to adhere to my schedule to service my customers.
While at church one Sunday, a friend who happened to be a doctor came up to me and said “Tony, you don’t look well.” I replied back “I don’t feel well.” He knew that it wasn’t like me to say something like that. My friend convinced me to make an appointment at his office to find out what was going on. The following week in his office he examined my spleen and liver. He said I needed to have some kind of scan. He set up the appointment for the next day. A few days after the scan my test results came back and he said they were inconclusive. In other words, not enough information was found to determine the cause of my illness.
Doctors are trained to investigate the worst and hope for the best. Needless to say my doctor friend became very frustrated. He referred me to a specialist, known as a hematologist, (someone who studies blood and how it relates to disease). My friend, Dr. Dave Wyatt gave me the number of the specialist, Dr. Robert Laugen.
By the time I made the appointment with Dr. Laugen I was really feeling weak and my complexion was looking worse. I went in for my first appointment. Dr. Laugen hit me with a barrage of questions. He was looking at the possibility that it might have something to do with my work. He was concerned that the material I used had somehow entered my body and become toxic. He began to draw my blood and in the first test run he couldn’t find anything abnormal. I had to go back every day for two weeks to have my blood drawn. I began to feel like a pin cushion, first one arm, then the other. And in that time I really felt like I was going to die.
I still continued to work, though. My office where I did my paperwork was in the basement. It got to the point where I went up and down the stairs on my hands and knees.
A couple of days before my last scheduled appointment I went into the office and Dr. Laugen said “A light bulb went off in my head last night!” He said “I realized your ancestry came from the Mediterranean plus the fact you are a full Italian gave me the suspicion you might have Thalassemia.” He took a sample of my blood and put it under the microscope and sure enough, it matched with the picture in his resource journal. He explained to me what Thalassemia was. It was a rare Mediterranean blood disorder, one in which the red blood cells have less rounded ones. I have plenty of red blood cells but I have more flat cells than round ones. And that’s where the fatigue fit in; flatter cells are unable to carry the needed oxygen properly throughout my body.
He said that in his research he discovered that my ancestors kept the strain going because it appeared to them that those who had it were able to ward off the malaria outbreaks. But there was insufficient data to back this up at the time. Dr. Laugen came up with a hypothesis that possibly a mosquito had bit me and it may have been carrying the Malaria toxin although malaria did not show in any of my lab work.
Again, another doctor became frustrated by not knowing what my illness was, or how to treat it. He said it would be about four days before he could research this further. Four more days of waiting…and suffering. I felt like my days on Earth were almost at an end.
Two days later I was lying in bed. My wife told me I was burning up with fever and suggested I go down to the basement where it was cooler. It was a hot summer evening and because we didn’t have any air conditioning in our house, she did not have to tell me twice. It was a chore for me to do so but I made it to the downstairs TV room. There was a full size mattress on the floor where my boys often lay and watch TV.
I flopped myself down on that mattress and couldn’t move. The fever just wouldn’t let up. I was scared and started to cry. I finally let go and cried for God to take over because I had done everything I could. I felt like a baby crying himself to sleep. I must have fallen into a deep sleep because I had a dream that I was surrounded with what appeared to be bright white figures. I was raised up and I felt my fever vanish.
When I woke up I had to use the restroom, which unfortunately, was upstairs. I noticed I was able to walk up the stairs normally and I didn’t feel as feverish. I also was curious enough to look in the mirror and my complexion looked normal!
I still kept that appointment with Dr. Laugen on the forth day. When he saw me his jaw dropped to the floor with amazement. “Honestly,” he told me, “I was ready to give up hope because I really couldn’t pinpoint what you had wrong except your Thalassemia and I thought you were going to die.”
He took one last blood sample and the next day he called me and said that he wasn’t surprised but again—nothing was found. I never had to go back for any more blood tests after that and I began living my life as I had before, but with one exception.
The exception was that I had felt like I had been through a re-birth. I felt very different because in the past I had some abandonment issues that I hadn’t fully solved. When I was 12 years old I lost my mom to cancer. I had a father but only knew of him through a few pictures. Nobody would even let me talk about him. About seven years later I lost my Grandparents. I had lost my family nucleus and needless to say I went from an angry child to an angry adult.
Not only did I feel hatred towards the world, but towards God too. I felt the world and God owed me something for having taken so much away from me. I now had trouble trusting because how could I have faith in a God that had abandoned me? And even though I went to church I was still bitter and thought I had to control everything because I was the only one I could have faith in anymore.
But that night when I finally let go and had faith to turn my illness over to a higher power I realized that I didn’t have to be sick to be able to do that.
It is never too late to give up control of issues that you are holding onto. Why wait?
