Sweet Poison. Janet Starr Hull
had fallen prey to creative and deceptive advertising. Of course, at that point I didn’t know it.
In fact I achieved none of my goals. Not only wasn’t I thinner, but I became more nervous and irritable. “What’s with you these days?” my husband asked. “You are really hard to live with lately. Why don’t you go see somebody?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I’d reply. “I’m just overtired with the kids and all. I’ll be okay. Just give me a bit more help with the boys, and I’ll be all right.”
I have a lot of responsibilities on my shoulders, I justified to myself. I didn’t want to fight with Chuck, so I didn’t say out loud the resentments I felt: I can’t be expected to handle all of life’s demands in my usual optimistic manner, can I? So what if I’m a bit grumpier than normal. After all, I am gaining weight and I feel lousy, and I don’t know why. That’s enough to put anybody in a bad mood.
But my mood swings intensified. I was out of sorts all the time now. And I was becoming severely depressed. Boy, this weight gain is really getting to me, I thought.
My sleeping problems persisted into nightly insomnia. Before that first headache, I had always gone to bed early, slept like a log, and popped out of bed in the morning with a smile on my face. I was one of those “damned morning people.” Now, I continuously had trouble sleeping. I couldn’t fall asleep and, when I finally did, I’d wake up repeatedly throughout the night. I was having awful nightmares for the first time since I was a small child, too. I was not getting enough rest. I blamed it on the boys, on my workaholic husband, and my busy schedule. And the cycle continued.
When I had an idle moment, which wasn’t often, I assumed that my work schedule, exercising more and eating less were catching up with me, because I was always tired and feeling weak. How could that be? I lifted weights and did sit-ups every day. Working out regularly should have made my body stronger, not weaker. But I was weaker, without a doubt.
And my weight gain didn’t slow down. Even to myself I had to acknowledge my husband was right. I was hard to live with. I was living my worst nightmare!
I know humans shed hair seasonally just like any other mammal, especially in the spring and autumn, but I was soon pulling massive chunks of hair from my head every day.
Next, my fingernails started to split and tear. I’d always enjoyed long, hard, beautiful fingernails. Okay, I asked myself, what was going on: headaches, weight gain, hair loss, and now my nails? I was falling apart. It took a few more months before I realized these changes were simply not going to go away. All of them crept up on me one by one, so I didn’t see them as parts of one problem.
The symptoms were irritating as hell, but I continued to shrug them off as by-products of the life I’d chosen. You name it, I blamed it. Excuses worked for a while, until one day my heart began to beat out of control.
For the first time in more than a decade of aerobic training, my resting heart rate uncharacteristically elevated. Not to mention that it skyrocketed during aerobic workouts. It actually hurt as my heart forced the blood through my veins. My irregular pulse made me feel dizzy and overheated. My aerobic workouts were becoming a strain, but I couldn’t let my fitness students know this. In addition, I had an extremely difficult time maintaining my balance, and one day while teaching a low-impact class, I stumbled and fell. There I was leading a side-to-side grapevine with a packed class imitating my every move and boom—flat on my ass. I looked around but there appeared to be no uneven flooring or other reason. How embarrassing! I didn’t know what to say so I laughed it off. But something happened to me then that had never happened in over a decade of aerobic training.
I perspired now more than I ever had. I literally had sweat streaming down me when I worked out—my leotard stuck to my wet body like plastic wrap. My students came to me after class and asked with sincere concern, “Are you all right?” “Oh, yeah,” I replied as I try to think of some clever excuse for my awkward appearance. “I’m just going for it tonight.”
My breathing wasn’t normal anymore, either. I developed allergies for the first time in my life. I started using an asthma inhaler for what the doctor diagnosed as “exercise-induced asthma.” I could no longer complete a morning aerobic workout without taking a hit of medicine before and after class.
Questions ricocheted through my anxious mind. Could stress cause me to develop breathing problems? What else led to asthma for the first time in thirty-five years?
I didn’t get much reaction from my husband. I wished he would help me figure this mystery out, but he was very non-committal. The boys were, of course, too little to help me. I was on my own with this one.
My physical appearance continued to deteriorate. I gained more weight and developed more puffiness. My eyeballs now protruded, causing difficulties with my vision. I’d worn hard contact lenses since I was fifteen years old, but other than that, my vision had been stable. I visited the eye doctor trying to find what could be wrong. “Why am I having problems now?” I questioned the eye specialist. He didn’t know, but he did find some deterioration of the retina in both eyes.
My symptoms worsened. And so did my marriage. My health deteriorated from the inside-out; what I called the “silent kill.” Slowly. Silently. The body deteriorates cell by cell, but you don’t know what’s happening because you can’t see it. You feel bad, but nothing shows up in laboratory tests. Finally, over time, the symptoms manifest into a major disease you can see. A degenerative disease.
“I know something is very wrong,” I voiced to myself. “But what is causing these problems?” I didn’t realize these symptoms were all connected somehow. Headaches. Eye problems. Mood swings. Weight gain. Hair loss.
By now, my periods were so deranged I thought I was pregnant every other month, even though I’d had a tubal ligation a few months after Brian was born. Something was definitely awry, but I still blamed it on stress and my busy schedule. I frequently scheduled appointments with my gynecologist. Every time I saw him with the same complaints of spotting throughout the month and bad cramping for the first time in my life, I was relieved that I was not pregnant. “So what’s the deal, then?” I questioned. “I suspect I am developing endometriosis.”
He disagreed. In fact, the doctor never found anything wrong with me. “You have all the textbook symptoms,” he said, “but I can’t find anything wrong.”
“Okay, Doctor. I’ll stop worrying about it and move on.”
And that’s just what I tried to do. I kept teaching at the university along with teaching aerobics and taking my morning jogs. The boys grew bigger and became more demanding. I kept gaining weight and continued having headaches. My husband still worked marathon hours and was home very little. The impasse between us deepened. And, every afternoon before I left the campus, I grabbed a diet drink for the ride home. . . .
My symptoms kept mounting. I assumed things couldn’t get much worse, but I was wrong. My emotions transformed from disagreeable to hysteria to my and my family’s horror. “Have you gone to the doctor lately?” Chuck asked. “What does the doctor say?”
“Nothing,” I replied in frustration. “No one can find anything wrong with me.”
“Well, I wish somebody would,” he said under his breath. But I heard him anyway, and silently agreed.
I knew I was hard to live with these days. I couldn’t help it. Not only did I feel horrible and look like hell, but I rode an emotional roller coaster from the minute I woke up until the time I went to sleep.
One day while cashing a check at the bank, the teller asked me for my driver’s license. I bit her head off. “Why do you want my license?” I felt my voice rise. “Do you think my check is going to bounce or something?” Maybe she thinks I stole the checkbook. What’s her problem? My temper flared without warning, and I embarrassed myself by becoming belligerent and acting the fool again. I immediately followed my verbal assault with an apology. “I’m so sorry. I just don’t know what has gotten into me these days. I guess it’s my job or my kids. I don’t know anymore.”