2000-2007

Over this stretch of years, many things happened:

• For a few years until my Mom became very ill, I spent most of my leisure time working with Gulf War veterans. My connections with a couple of the experts in the field of Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) and my natural ability to get people to talk to me made this a perfect way to give back. I was most glad to be able to pass along medical information I had learned to vets who needed it. I became sort of a courier.
  
  One of my civilian colleagues in the field of chemical sensitivity wanted to write a book and produce a documentary film about GWS. She had already done so on the topic of civilians affected by chemical exposures. Therefore, I introduced her to the experts in the field whom I knew. She had been struck by my story; I had once asked an attorney whom I was helping with a case how much an amputated life was worth? He could not answer me.
  
  At any rate, the book and film happened. I made a lot of good friends, some of whom have since died. I still have my connection to the vets—I guess because of my Dad I have always had this connection.
  
  We need a footnote here; after twenty years, mainstream medicine and our government are still debating whether or not GWS is real or not. Yes. It is real. Do I really need to explain this? We are very lucky that our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan today are far smarter than many physicians. The latter seem to need one cause to equal one disease. They cannot understand that a barrage of exposures can cause a multitude of symptoms from all kinds of damage. One cause equals one disease. Geez…our soldiers in combat today know that one IED does not necessarily have one trigger.
  
  Okay, I had my rant.
  
  
• My physician found the reason for the heart attack. I had an autoimmune thyroid disease, atrophic autoimmune thyroiditis, which can be caused by chemical exposures. The mechanism of the antibody that causes this disease acts in a strange way: It causes regular thyroid tests to appear as though the patient has too much thyroid when the exact opposite is true. So lowering thyroid supplements only causes less and less cortisol and more and more adrenaline to be produced. And I already was producing way too little cortisol.
• Yes, I did indeed have adrenal insufficiency. Failure to identify and treat the thyroid autoimmune disease and especially the adrenal insufficiency, which often accompanies this disease, can cause cardiovascular spasm. That's what I had in May 1997. That's what happened.
• My physician also is an ENT surgeon and allergist. For the very first time, the junk in my nose was sampled and tested. What came back was shocking to both of us—non-anthrax bacillus. This is nasty and you do not treat it with regular oral antibiotics. For a year, I had been spewing forth streams of dark brown stuff and no one found it, never mind figured it out.
• I also had a bad case of mycoplasma pneumonia. Okay—more medical education. There are several strains of this lousy thing, mycoplasma. What they have in common is their strange bacteria-viral physiology. They are neither one nor the other. They have no cell walls. That's why antibiotics have a hard time killing them, because these drugs work by destroying the invading disease cells' walls. A lot of Gulf War vets deal with various strains of mycoplasma. I was also diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Go look that up if you want. I don’t even want to talk about that.
• And a few other things; we suspect neurological damage. But after seeing neurologists at the famous place, I had given up on getting any real answers from them.
• In the autumn of 2002, the horrific care my Dad was getting from the local Veterans' Administration Hospital led to a very late diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
• My physician planned a minor, out-patient surgery to correct some of the mistakes made during the 1998 surgery—I had not been able to blow my nose since then. The morning of the surgery, my Dad died. I had lost my best friend.