Health Bio

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I played around with my BFA in Dramatic Writing for a while after graduating NYU. I worked for director Alan J. Pakula (now, sadly, deceased) for two crazy years, briefly at Premiere magazine, then moved to San Francisco where I worked in publishing and theatre. When I moved to Los Angeles it was because my screenwriting netted me literary managers and they had me out pimping my scripts at the studios.

After a year of fighting them on what I wanted to write—they kept expecting I’d come up with “Die Hard on the space shuttle” or something—my managers’ company went under. I’d been paying the bills with a decent job as a legal proofreader, swing shift with a screenplay’s worth of entertaining characters, but decided I needed a better career now that I’d been demoted from “unemployed screenwriter” to “unemployed, unrepresented screenwriter.” So, following a life-long interest, I got my associate’s in Sign Language/Interpreting from Pierce College.

It was in my last semester of the interpreter training program (ITP), a semester much anticipated and feared by all students, when I came down with mononucleosis, or glandular fever. It was a pretty rough case and I also had walked around with it for a while, not giving into the idea that I was sick. (Which was my habit the entirety of my former, ridiculously healthy life.) I had just nabbed the mentorship of my dreams, in an acting class where the deaf student turned out to be a friend of mine, and I had only a couple of months before I would graduate. So I made the decision to go back to school after only two weeks, by which point I was not recovered at all.

From there, it seemed like two sets of dominoes fell in quick succession: one lovely and shiny, with the future mirrored in its surface; the other made of moldy, infected wood that splinters when it’s touched. I met the man who would become my husband, started a job interpreting at community colleges—a setting I fell in love with and never really left—and continued developing my craft and learning about the deaf community.

During this time, however, I had a case of human parvovirus (sometimes implicated in the development of CFS), and was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an auto-immune disease that causes hyperthyroidism. This was after a year where my insomnia, which I’ve had since I was a kid, went out of control and I started a strict exercise regimen in advance of a marine biology study trip, but never lost any weight. I was then overdosed on methimazole, an anti-thyroid medication, to the point of becoming so hypOthyroid that I mainly remember a year or so of feeling like a zombie 24/7. Two endocrinologists later, I finally found one who reduced my dosage to where my thyroid was balanced, and stayed there. The Graves’ is still in remission but I had to dump that doctor as well.

At this point, with my thyroid in balance, I was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) but didn’t know it. I kept waiting to get better, thinking my body was still recovering from the thyroid yo-yo. It wasn’t until I got engaged and started working out regularly again that I realized something else was definitely wrong. Somehow exercise always seems to factor into my diagnoses. I lost 20 pounds in two months and while everyone marveled, “You must feel great,” the fact was that I hadn’t felt worse since I was hypo. Visits to immunologists and infectious disease specialists were fruitless. Finally I started doing my own research and found that my symptoms—post-exertional malaise, unrefreshing sleep, swollen glands, sore throat, unexplained fevers, etc.—weren’t as random as they seemed.

I was diagnosed with CFS by a GP who has had a lot of experience with the illness, in October 2006. A year later, I was finishing my master’s coursework in TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages), starting a new dream job creating curricula and teaching English grammar and writing to underprepared deaf college students, and about to be married.

In January 2008, the CFS got worse. A lot worse. Three semesters into my job, it was clear I would have to resign.  This was a decision I came to on my own; my boss, though she agreed, was never anything but supportive during my struggle to work through my increasing disability. Nevertheless, it was devastating. I’ve been working, in school, or both since I was 14, and losing that identity has been one of the hardest things to accept.

And now I am unemployed, blogging and advocating, and generally trying to figure out what you do when the lessons by which you’ve always lived your life suddenly no longer apply. My social life is extremely limited, but I’m lucky to have great friends, even if they’re in other cities, and to be surrounded mostly by people who understand and accept my situation. I’m especially fortunate to have a husband who is always there for me, and I am deeply grateful to him that this illness hasn’t taken the devastating and often fatal toll on our marriage that it takes on so many relationships.

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