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.
Back into the “mom” routine, I stopped with the boys at a friend’s house a few afternoons later. Sitting on Deb’s deck in a backyard full of trees always seemed to me like taking a vacation. Deb was a good friend from years past, and I always loved going to her house. So did the boys. They played happily taking turns in her hammock for hours. Over a cup of tea, Deb and I talked about my mysterious health problems.
“You know, I’m going to Doctor Steve Fugua, a renowned nutritionist in Dallas. My parents have been going to him for years, and they’re very healthy and young looking.” Deb told me. “Here.” She handed me a piece of paper and a pen. “Write down his number and call him.” Deb didn’t have to twist my arm.
“I’ll call Doctor Fugua tomorrow,” I replied.
I
