by Lucinda Ruh
Wayne would be filled with days of teaching at skating rink and days of doctors’ visits and treatments and I already dreaded the days to come. I could feel we were there for no reason and no fruition. I felt it was only a required bus stop en route to my destiny. I thought I was definitely not on the fast track of life. I was on the bus that stopped on every corner to refuel. Maybe this way I was to see life more clearly then have it whizz by me. Maybe this way I was meant to experience every single wobble on the earth’s surface and every single rut and pebble under my feet. I was meant to feel that pea under the mattress. I was meant to suffer for greater things to come.
For each doctor I had so many symptoms that they did not know where to start, where to end, what to look at first. They were trying to look at the whole picture but if you don’t lift off each stone in the right order to get to the source, a way to heal me would not be found. I was having so many therapies that I was busy around the clock watching the time in order to take what medicine from which doctor at what specific hour. To top it off I was getting frequent IVs because I was so weak. The IVs lasted for almost three hours and lying next to cancer patients and people with many other illnesses, was incredibly depressing. I was always the youngest in the doctors’ offices. It was incredibly sad for my mother to watch me lying down with needles stuck in me with a solution dripping into my veins. She sometimes watched me cry and I know it tore her apart. It had come to this again, and for what? To kill myself in order to do something in the world that no one else did?
I was composed when in public but at home I started getting crazy. The illness was making me absolutely nuts. To be feeling sick every single day for seven years was just too much for me to handle anymore. It felt like my skin was crawling and I desperately wanted to shed it. I wanted a whole new body. I tried so hard to contain myself but I could no longer. I was now starting to have mini-seizures as well. My body would shake and become paralyzed and I could not move my lips or fingers or arms or legs. It was terrifying and my mother rushed me to the hospital many times. I felt so sorry for her. It was understandable that my mother once again broke into her fits many more times. We were all trying so hard and yet I never woke up feeling any better. I was actually feeling worse than ever before.
We stayed one year in Wayne, New Jersey until near the end of 2006 and were unable to find any doctors who improved me with their treatments. I wanted to go back to Los Angeles where someone had recommended a reputable and famous doctor who specialized in all my symptoms. One thing my mother and I did was to never give up hope. We had so much of it somehow. It seemed unimaginable to have that much in times like this but God was giving us strength. My father far away gave us all the support he could and kept up his hopes, too. My mother and I really had no one else to turn to.
Once back in Los Angeles my mother and I were happy to start treatment with a new doctor. The little bit of energy we both had left we gave to our hopes and trust in the new doctor. I would go through five different major doctors’ treatments during my next two years of living in Los Angeles, four treatments for all my different ailments and one specifically for my back pain. All the while, my mother drove me to all the ice rinks around the city. Every day for two years consisted of driving to the rink to teach and train while still holding on to the hope I might skate again, and then driving to doctors for treatments, then driving home to sleep, and then beginning this all over again the next morning.
When in the past I ate, slept, skated and studied, now I was to eat not much, sleep not well, teach in tears, and be treated at doctors’ offices. I was a dead-alive person. Really, there was no other way of putting it. I felt truly dead emotionally, physically, mentally, yet alive because I was still breathing. When would my luck change? I could not believe how long my mother and I endured this hardship. This was our second time to try having a good life in this city and we hoped for better results.
From 1999 until this time I had thought that I had hit rock bottom so many times that I would be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel fairly soon. But I had never hit as far down as I did in those two years in Los Angeles. The only way I could think was, “Let me hit so far down that I will create such a big bounce when I come back up, that I will reach high, high up into the stars.” That was my only hope and without it I just wanted to die. I made myself believe it. What else could I do? It took about one hour for my mother to drive me to my first doctor in L.A. and I slept each way. I underwent tests like never before, such as being x-rayed by having my body filled with all kinds of liquid solutions so my body would light up under the machines. I even had a sleep apnea test that I was so scared to go to that my mother had to sleep next to me in the bed. I was hooked up to so many wires I looked like a robot.
I never met so many doctors and underwent so many tests as then. Every single day I was being tested and tried, bruised and banged up. I was exhausted, terrified and sad beyond expression and belief. They analyzed me once again for everything they could think of, all reaching one conclusion of chronic fatigue syndrome. I could not believe and did not want to believe I had that. I just did not feel it in my bones.
But I went through the endless treatments. I had to take so many pills I was hardly eating anything. I could not stomach anything else. I had my IV treatments twice a week. My arms were black and blue from all the needle punctures. I was on every diet imaginable. I had gone through being a vegetarian, eating only raw food, or only protein, or only wild grains, or a type O blood type diet, or having only juices, or just fasting and cleanses. I mean my body had gone through so much it felt like it was starting to reject every single thing I put in it.
Every day I read self-improvement books and health and diet books. Anything in the bookstore sold to help the self was in my library. I read and read and although I had become such a health fanatic I was getting more and more sick. What was I doing wrong? One of the doctors referred me to a hormone specialist in Beverly Hills as well, since all my hormones were completely off-balance. They said I had adrenal fatigue, thyroid problems, and again everything you can name. In addition to all my pills from the first doctor this second doctor had me rubbing and swallowing hormones at all times of the day.
Sometimes I was completely confused about what to take when and what reaction to expect from each. My hormones were completely out of sorts to start with, but they just went off the charts once I started the hormonal treatment. I went from growing mustaches to losing hair, from having my breasts grow and to then having them disappear completely, from having a period once a month to having a period lasting for a month, from crying every day to giggling every day. I became a walking health dictionary and an emotional wreck! I knew everything about everything but knew nothing about what I had. The problem was I had so many problems.
For my back pain I went to another spine and nerve specialist since I was in knife-like pain everywhere in my spine and hips and the pain was going down my legs. More MRIs and X-rays were done and they wanted to give me another medication for the pain and nerve damage but since I was already on so much medicine I refused to take that one. By now I had seen three doctors and almost a year had passed. I had everything you can imagine to try to heal me. I had healing bracelets, healing beds, healing mattresses, healing towels, healing cushions, healing rings, healing massages and Reiki sessions.
All these doctors cost my parents an arm and a leg and a heart and a brain! Many of the treatments and medications, especially all the alternative ones, were not covered by our health insurance in Switzerland. I was burning a hole through my parents’ bank accounts once more. I felt so incredibly guilty and I could not really do anything more than I already was.
The first doctor had prescribed Adderall for me because I was more than exhausted, to the point where some days I could barely utter a word. My arms were so tired that I could barely pick up the phone. My legs were so tired I could not walk up and down the few stairs we had in our new home. I was on the sofa bed all day too tired
to read or to watch television. I just lay there looking at the ceiling waiting for the hours to go by, hoping to sleep at night. I was more tired than ever, yet inside my nerves were so shaken that I felt like I trembled nonstop. I was totally physically and mentally broken down. Consequently the doctor had me on pills to wake up and pills to go to sleep!
Then the first doctor prescribed for me to inject myself twice a day with Heparin. They said my blood was clotting and not circulating so I needed to thin out my blood. I had bags and bags of needles and solutions. My home looked like a walk-in pharmacy! Medicine was everywhere. My whole stomach and legs looked like chicken pox from needle holes. I felt like a very sick person when injecting myself twice a day, but I would have done anything to be well.
I would not have minded doing all the routines the doctors prescribed if I had felt better but nothing improved. I stayed with those first three doctors for almost one year. It was an absolutely crazy life. It wasn’t a life. It was hanging on to the last thread of life. I can’t explain it any other way.
We decided it was time to find another doctor and start another treatment plan. The fourth was an alternative doctor. He supplemented his treatments with a lot of herbal medicine, claiming he had treated and cured many celebrities. We were up for anything so we agreed to his regimen. For another six to eight months we allowed my body to be treated by him since prior to him each and every doctor had seemed helpless. They were so baffled by my situation and did not know how to help.
This new alternative medicine doctor complained about my being on so much medication. He told me to throw it all out. I don’t know what he was complaining about when he just replaced them all with his herbal medications. One day I counted the pills he had me take and they amounted to almost seventy pills that I had to swallow a day!
Again I did anything I was told. I made sure I did not skip one pill and I did not eat one thing I shouldn’t. It was a full time job trying to get healthy! I believed in each and every doctor and treatment fully since I knew believing was powerful, but nothing changed. I just became more and more sick, more nauseous, and more tired. I was rushed to the hospital by ambulance many more times within the next eight months for mini-seizures and fainting spells.
At this time I had no social or work life — no friends, no boyfriend, and no acquaintances. I mean how could I even go somewhere or meet a friend when I was so tired and unsociable and had to have my mother by me all the time? As much as my mother was trying to push me to enjoy my young life, it was impossible.
Suddenly, toward the end of the summer in 2008 something drastically changed. I made a decision, basically because I just had no more strength, to give up fighting the flow of life. I completely altered my mentality. I did not mind anymore if I did not wake up the next morning. I knew in my heart I had tried everything. I thought if I did not wake up, I would then be at long last free of my pain. It was a little scary to not care at all but also quite freeing. I gave up my fight to push what maybe was not my destiny.
Every night before falling asleep I spoke to God and said, “If you really do not need me on this earth and it is my time to go to you, please take me now, because it is too painful for me to be here. But God, I promise you, if you let me live and become healthy once more I will do everything possible in my life to be an inspiration to help to heal others. I will serve you. I will try to protect those who need protection as I needed it while growing up. I promise to heal the world in my way.” I would cry myself to sleep as I tirelessly repeated this conversation with God over and over again. Every morning I awoke to the sun shining, and therefore I knew God needed me more on earth than in the heavens. But, I continued to just let go of everything, to not think, to not want, to not try. I could not fight anymore. I had been told all my life to fight and I had no more power to do it.
Surprisingly just as I was giving up and not caring truly if I lived or died, and not wanting to learn one more thing about what or why my body was going through all of this, someone we knew referred us to a well-recommended doctor, He actually recommended that I see him for my back pain. It was truly destiny that would bring me to the new doctor.
My mother and I, smiling as usual and with our heads held high, visited the doctor. My mother and I told each other that this was it. After this, if the treatment did not work, we would just go home to Switzerland. This time we did not expect much and maybe the less you expect the more you get. I mean how could we expect anything when we had been let down time and time again? How could we expect good results after nine years of continual struggle with my health? Since all doctors were different in their methods, we said nothing as he did his battery of tests. Once more I was prodded and poked and my blood was wanted.
He called us back about a week later for his findings and diagnosis. Since we thought we had heard it all, we were more interested in his recommendation of treatment than the diagnosis, hoping always that he might help with whatever on earth my body was going through. He sat us down. He was a man with a wise demeanor and calmness.
He began to talk. And the more he talked the more light bulbs started to flick on in our heads, and the more the events and situations in my life started to make sense. This doctor was saying things that none of the other doctors had mentioned. Yes, he said, I was certainly traumatized, overexerted, and mentally and physically broken down. At that time my head, ears, nose, and eyes were still all swollen from pressure and flu-like symptoms and my body was tingling from weak blood flow, my stomach was upset all the time but no one had been able to explain to us why I experienced this.
This doctor then got to the point and made his surprising diagnosis. He said he concluded that I was suffering from post-concussion syndrome and a related post-traumatic stress disorder. He believed that I had suffered many concussions as I spun with the force, speed, and power of my spins. He said I had been spinning so fast for so long and for so many hours a day that I had caused mini-concussions of my brain every single day that I did my spins. My quick and powerful entrance to the spins, then the fast acceleration of rotations themselves, followed by the quick or slow exit from my spins, had caused so much brain and head damage that it had affected my whole nervous system and therefore my immune system as well.
He also interestingly mentioned that when you suffer a concussion the pituitary gland is also injured and since this gland regulates hormones, my hormones were not in balance. He explained that the concussions caused my inner ear to be damaged, had blurred my vision, and was the reason I had vertigo, felt sick to my stomach, and had constant exhaustion. It was all linked to the brain and the fluid that the brain was floating in.
His diagnosis clearly made perfect sense to me. It was that I was feeling the effects of an ongoing concussion every day. I had been spinning much more and much faster than any other skaters I knew. I had been spinning at least two to three consecutive hours a day, and many more hours on some days, every day from the age of four. Just spinning and spinning in one direction.
The doctor ordered that my body would need much time to rest before it could even begin to heal. He said I would not be allowed to spin at all, and if ever again. We never had imagined or realized this. We had all along thought the spins were too beautiful, magical, and elegant to cause any trouble to my health. Although it wasn’t easy to hear this, to say the least, we were thrilled that finally we had found a doctor who made sense. It was even more emotionally anguishing than what we had heard previously but it was a great relief to finally have an explanation for why my body was reacting the way it was.
Of course, I still wanted to spin. I had come to the point where I was addicted to the feeling of spinning, and it was my fame, my treasure, and my product of twenty years of work. And so I would miss it terribly and I would miss the feeling it always had given me. I had always been very determined to follow doctors’ orders but this would certainly be the hardest order yet.
How could I permanently stop something I loved and was starved for every day? Ho
w could I stop the only thing that I thought had kept me alive all these years? Stopping spinning would come with great consequences just as stopping any repetitive and compulsive action does.
The doctor started to treat me with chiropractic work, acupuncture, and also some homeopathic medicine for my symptoms but firmly stated it would help only a little, but the most important factor was rest and not to do any physical activity. I would have to let my body heal itself. Surprisingly, within a few months I was really starting to feel better. I actually started to feel like I had a little more energy, maybe also because now I knew where all my suffering was stemming from. It was a huge relief filling in the last piece of the puzzle. My mind was able to relax a little more and, even though none of my symptoms had truly disappeared yet, I felt some energy to at least start waking up from my fog and dream state.
The more time that passed without spinning on the ice, the less dizzy I was and the more within my balance I became. The less I spun the less my ears were ringing, the less nauseous I felt from gastrointestinal illnesses, and the fewer headaches I experienced. The less I spun the less I was having more concussions, but of course I still needed to heal from all the damage I had already done to my body. It would take time, patience and prayers. Still today I am recovering, and I feel that only now does my life once more begin.