A Mind Unraveled

by Kurt Eichenwald

“Congratulations,” he said. I finally took his hand. “You’re a reporter trainee for The New York Times.”

  * * *

  —

  My beat was Wall Street. Based on my reporting during the market crash, the editors had concluded I must be a financial expert, though I actually didn’t know the difference between a stock and a bond. I walked to a bookstore on Fifty-seventh Street and purchased business titles to help me learn the basics.

  I marveled that a nobody like me suddenly was on the phone with power players in the world of finance—officials from the New York Stock Exchange, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Congress, major businesses. In one of the most surprising calls early on, Donald Trump contacted me to discuss a flattering profile about him from that day’s Times. I had nothing to do with the article and tried to hide my confusion about why he had bothered to phone me to praise a piece about himself.

  My strategy, for as long as I could get away with it, was to reveal my ignorance only to people I interviewed, a tactic I learned from another reporter. In one of my first days in my new job, I spoke to a man who told me he was an equities analyst.

  “What’s an equities analyst?” I asked.

  The man ranted about my inexperience until I interrupted him. “Look, I can either look stupid to you now or pretend I know things I don’t. That might make you look stupid in the paper tomorrow. Which do you prefer?”

  He calmed down and answered my question.

  When my trainee period ended, John Lee, an assistant managing editor, invited me to lunch at the fanciest restaurant I had patronized in years. We settled at a table near the back of the room, and he spent several minutes recalling his own experiences at the Times. Then on to me.

  “Where did you learn about finance?” he asked.

  I can’t be fired. “On the job,” I replied.

  “Which job?”

  “This one. Covering Wall Street for the paper.”

  If Lee had not been such a courtly southern gentleman, he might have spat out his drink. “You didn’t know anything?”

  “Not even the difference between a stock and a bond.”

  A wisp of anger crossed his face. “Don’t you think you should have told us?”

  “Let me ask,” I responded. “You’re told that you can be a Times reporter on an important beat. Would you try to convince the people offering you the job that they’re making a mistake?”

  He crinkled his forehead. “No,” he said. “I suppose not.”

  * * *

  —

  As I settled into work, I decided finally to have doctors treat the physical damage inflicted by almost a decade of seizures. I visited an internist for a checkup. I asked about my ribs, which hadn’t hurt for years; he told me the fractures had healed long ago. I also mentioned that my joints ached so badly I sometimes couldn’t sleep. He looked at my knuckles and noticed a small growth under the skin on my right index finger.

  “Has anyone ever examined that?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Have your knuckles always been this swollen?”

  I glanced at my hands. They were swollen, terribly. “They haven’t always been like this. I don’t know when this started.”

  He recommended a rheumatologist, but before visiting with that doctor, I saw an oral surgeon. Years had passed since the fibrous mass had appeared in my mouth, caused by biting during seizures. With my drug levels fairly high, the doctor decided to use IV Valium rather than a stronger anesthetic while cutting out the growth. I vaguely remember watching unalarmed as blood spurted during the procedure.

  During this round of doctor visits, I discovered I had found the strength to take control of my healthcare, ignoring poorly considered recommendations and always staying on the lookout for recklessness. In fact, I delighted in humiliating doctors for their gaffes, treating them as stand-ins for the medical specialists who had hurt me in the past.

  At Naarden’s suggestion, I sought out a New York neurologist. This new doctor was horrified that I still experienced convulsions every few weeks and recommended major medication changes.

  “I’m not going to do that,” I replied.

  “Kurt,” he said, “the most important thing is that we get control of these seizures.”

  I sat back in my chair. “Fine, give me a gun, and I’ll blow my brains out.”

  His eyes widened. “What?” he gasped.

  “That would take care of it, wouldn’t it? That would stop the seizures.”

  “Are you…”

  “No.” I sighed. “I’m not suicidal. I’m making a point. You say controlling the seizures is the most important thing. Blowing my brains out would accomplish that. Clearly, that’s a bad alternative.”

  He looked confused.

  How can he not understand this? “The most important thing is having the life I want. If I’d rather have some seizures and fewer side effects, that’s my choice. The decision of what’s the most important thing is mine, not yours.”

  I never saw that neurologist again.

  On to the rheumatologist. After an examination, he told me my anticonvulsants had probably damaged the soft tissue in my joints, which may have played a role in creating the lump on my finger. He recommended an anti-inflammatory to lessen the joint pain and started filling out the prescription.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “What effect will this drug have on my anticonvulsants?”

  He kept writing. “I’ve never heard of it having any effect.”

  I’ve never heard of that as a side effect…

  I looked on the credenza behind him. A copy of the Physicians’ Desk Reference was lined up alongside other books.

  “I didn’t ask what you’ve heard of,” I snapped. “I asked what’s going to happen. Now, could you look it up in the PDR?”

  The doctor stared at me with an expression of anger and disbelief, then grabbed the book, flipping through the pages. The fury in his face vanished before he spoke again.

  “Well,” he began slowly, “it might raise your Dilantin level. But that’s not a big deal.”

  I was going to enjoy this.

  “ ‘Not a big deal,’ ” I repeated softly. “That’s good to hear. ‘Not a big deal.’ ”

  I let a moment pass, then leaned forward. “Tell me,” I said as I glared at him. “What’s my Dilantin level?”

  Silence, then a look of panic. He had no idea. “Well, I assume it’s in the therapeutic range…”

  “ ‘I assume,’ ” I sneered, sarcastically mimicking his tone. “You assume? Are you kidding?”

  I took a breath, trying to keep from screaming. “I’m at the top of the therapeutic level. And when you raise drugs to higher than therapeutic, they can become toxic. So this is a big deal.”

  I stood. “You’re incompetent,” I said. “And you’re fired.”

  * * *

  —

  On New Year’s Eve 1988, I wandered uncomfortably through an Upper East Side home stuffed with antique furniture, high-end glassware, and artwork. Each table held expensive decorative pieces, all of them breakable. A convulsion here could cause thousands of dollars in damage.

  An array of well-dressed people bustled about, enjoying gourmet food and vintage wines. I had traveled to this party straight from the Times and felt utterly out of place. I was a newspaper scribbler, far from high-class. The owners of this home were the in-laws of my college roommate Franz, who lived in New York and had insisted I attend the party. The previous New Year’s Eve, I had gone to South Street Seaport, where I had a seizure. I ended up in the hospital, and a nurse found my emergency contact information. That led to Franz being called away from a romantic evening with his wife so he could take me home. Not this New Year’s Eve, Franz insisted. He would not walk out on his in-laws. If I had a seizure, he wanted me close by.
/>
  His demands were all a ruse. He knew that I would be uncomfortable in the fancy apartment, worried about expensive breakables and possibly about embarrassing him if I experienced convulsions. There was someone he wanted me to meet, and he didn’t want to get into a debate with me about whether I would come. But he knew I would never refuse if he portrayed the invitation as being for his benefit. So he decided to trick me into joining the party.

  I avoided food and drink to protect against dropping them on the rugs, which looked as if they would cost more to clean than I earned in a week. I wished I hadn’t come; I could have avoided the chance of disrupting Franz’s night by just staying in bed in my apartment.

  Nearby, I saw a woman in a dark dress on a piano bench. She looked right at me and smiled. I immediately thought that her green eyes were stunning. She patted the spot next to her, inviting me to join her. I felt embarrassed; this woman was way out of my league. When she spoke, the words came out in an elegant accent I could not quite place, a mixture of British, French, and something else. She introduced herself as Theresa Pearse. She was loosely related to Franz; her older sister had married an older man who was the father of Franz’s wife. I ran that through my head—Theresa was effectively Franz’s aunt, though she appeared to be about my age.

  We spent the evening talking. Usually I was nervous speaking to single women socially, but I felt relaxed, with none of my typical self-consciousness. She was flirtatious and intelligent and somehow made me forget my belief that I had been invited to keep me out of trouble. She mentioned that she was wearing a knee brace because she injured herself in a skiing accident. I glanced down; until that moment, I had been so captivated I somehow missed seeing the medical device wrapped around her leg.

  She told me that she was halfway through a medical internship in Philadelphia and would be working as a resident in July. She had traveled to New York for the party and was staying with her parents, who lived nearby. I told her about my job and my background, but mentioned nothing about my health.

  Unknown to me, she had already learned everything from her sister when Franz married into the family. For this evening, Franz had—without telling me—invited me as a blind date for Theresa after first making sure she understood how to react if I had a seizure.

  As midnight approached, Theresa introduced me to her father, John Pearse. She took me aside. “Watch,” she said. “Five minutes after midnight, he’ll point at his watch and say, 'Well, Theresa, time to go.’ ”

  Theresa told me this to give me time to think. At 12:05, she would leave unless I offered to walk her to her parents’ house later. She did not know I worried about getting home by myself from empty streets where passersby would probably be drunk.

  Midnight arrived, and just as she had predicted, five minutes later her father pointed at his watch. “Well, Theresa,” he said, “time to go.”

  I stifled a laugh and made my decision. I offered to take her home if she stayed. She accepted. After thirty minutes or so, Theresa and I walked to her parents’ brownstone. We kissed good night, and she headed inside.

  * * *

  —

  Despite promising to stay in contact with her, I let two weeks pass without calling Theresa. Franz phoned me, annoyed I had broken my word. Theresa was his mother-in-law’s sister, he said, and I couldn’t be a jerk to her. My usual anxieties returned; I knew I owed it to Franz to call Theresa, but I feared she would shut me out once I told her about my health.

  I made excuses until finally I phoned her in Philadelphia. We spoke every night over the weeks that followed, except for one Tuesday. We discussed my visiting, which I knew couldn’t happen until I told her about my epilepsy. I brought it up hesitantly, and she interrupted to tell me the seizures were not an issue—Franz had told her everything long ago, she said. We set a date for my visit in late January, but pushed it off when the Times sent me to Chicago to cover a financial scandal. When I returned to New York in February, Theresa invited me to come see her.

  I packed a bag and on the way out the door ran into my landlord, who asked where I was going.

  “I’m headed for my first date with the woman I’m going to marry,” I replied.

  An audio letter from

  THERESA EICHENWALD, 2017

  The night I met Kurt, I was at my sister’s on New Year’s Eve, and I knew that we had essentially been set up on a blind date, and I was sitting in a dress that he actually remembers (and I didn’t until he remembered it), and I had a brace on my leg because I had hurt my knee skiing. I remember sitting there at the piano thinking, I’m going to work my charms. I knew about his epilepsy from Franz, but I didn’t think of it at all. It just never occurred to me that it would matter.

  We really did get to know each other on the telephone, and I asked to hear the story of what he had gone through. More than having epilepsy, what struck me [was] the fortitude, and the ability to overcome obstacles without getting struck down. I had grown up in an environment where people would create obstacles that didn’t exist, and here I was, talking to somebody who had real obstacles and overcame them.

  Other than him answering my questions about his past, epilepsy really [wasn’t the] focus at all in our conversations together. Then he finally did come down to meet me, and the only way that epilepsy ever really entered in the beginning of our relationship was that because of his medication, he could fall asleep just by closing his eyes, and was often deeply, deeply asleep and was hard to wake up in the morning. But so what?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Eight months later, Theresa and I stepped into a Manhattan restaurant hoping we had dressed appropriately for the evening. At a long table near the entrance, we saw a crowd surrounding Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the heir apparent to the publisher of The New York Times. Recently anointed as the paper’s second-in-command, Sulzberger had been inviting staff members—along with spouses or dates—for small get-togethers to establish a rapport with employees, and I had been tapped for this dinner.

  I approached the table with customary “meal with the boss” anxiety. Without a word, Theresa stepped in front of me to take the seat directly across from our host. To anyone else, her move might have seemed like a nervy way to get face-to-face with one of New York’s most powerful men. I knew better.

  In our short time together, Theresa had learned how I assessed the dangers of my surroundings. In this situation, the chair where I was least likely to injure myself was to the left of where Theresa sat. The space around it was open, so if I went into convulsions, I wouldn’t hit a hard surface other than the floor, and I wouldn’t be trapped between the table and a wall. She also knew I would feel awkward sitting first in that spot; it would seem odd to take the seat catty-corner to Sulzberger, almost as if I were afraid to sit across from him. Theresa solved the problem, essentially blocking me into the spot she knew I wanted. I breathed a silent thanks to her, marveling at how lucky I had been to find her.

  Things had moved fast for us. Theresa had planned to enter a residency program in Philadelphia but transferred to one at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan seven months after we met. I had been nervous about moving in together so quickly, but we had little choice. Residencies begin in July, and if she continued training in Philadelphia, we would have been forced to live in separate cities for at least two years.

  Even before she arrived in New York, my emotional barricades started to crumble. I had spent years focused on myself and my professional goals. Despite the outward signs of success, I lived in constant fear that a health setback or the revelation of my debilitated memory could destroy the life I had built. My dismissal from Swarthmore and my treatment by the Nader group left me believing I could lose everything in a matter of days, so I focused only on myself and keeping my employers happy.

  All that changed with Theresa. The daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, she grew up surrounded by the sadness and guilt th
at tore at her parents. Death loomed over the household; her father’s family had all perished in the Warsaw Ghetto and the concentration camps, while her mother’s youngest brother had sacrificed his life to save another sibling. Theresa’s parents fled Poland to England, where she was born, then moved to the United States. But they were adrift in their lives—Jews who abandoned their faith out of anger at a God that allowed millions to die, Americans who never adapted to the culture of their new homeland. The disconnect between her cultural acclimation and her parents’ alienation left Theresa torn between two worlds. When she tried to explain that growing up in the United States made her more American than the rest of the family, her mother responded, “Isn’t that a pity?”

  She possessed a happy, carefree side to her character and a sense of humor that matched my style, but Theresa was often shrouded in the gray sorrow of her upbringing. In our earliest months together, she offered me support in managing my feelings that stemmed from the constant threat of seizures, while I shared with her the lessons I had learned from a decade of health problems. I discussed finding the joy of each day, of escaping the emotional bonds of our past. We would sit talking on our bedroom floor, with me encouraging her to pursue her dream of becoming a clinician, rather than joining academic medicine as an homage to her father’s goals that had been dashed by the war.

  We became a mutual support system. For the first time, I told someone other than a counselor about my beating in Chicago. I no longer needed to record my thoughts in audio and written diaries; Theresa wanted to hear everything, whether from the past or from that day. My mindset changed from focusing on my own struggles to concern about helping the woman I loved to cultivate the humorous, daring, and joyful person submerged by her upbringing.

  In short order, we also discovered our different upbringings could lead to hilarity. Born in Britain and raised in Manhattan, where she attended a French school with the children of diplomats, Theresa spoke in a way that sometimes left me confused. When she told me my shoes were in the cupboard, I headed for the kitchen, puzzled why she had put them in with the dishes; after a laugh, she let me know that “cupboard” was a word used by the British for “closet.” Another time, she asked me to fetch my dressing gown. I stared at her for a moment, then said “American English, please?” She wanted me to get my robe.