Believe Me

by Yolanda Hadid

  Although the housewives and viewers can’t tell, my brain continues to fail as the season progresses. I’m not feeling well when we start, and it gets worse. I push through it, thinking that I’m just having a temporary breakdown of my health. I keep thinking, I’ll feel better next week. My mother instilled in me a very strong sense of obligation to commitments and the serious work ethic that I developed as a young girl is still with me. I guess nothing is going to change it. It’s just who I am.

  In the middle of the season, I am working my way through a lot of commitments. One of them is filming a meeting with my Web site designers in West Hollywood. As I make my way along Sunset Boulevard I suddenly crash into the car in front of me. It takes a second to realize what happened, but when I do I start crying. As I get out of the car, the driver from the other car walks toward me, yelling a string of profanities.

  “I’m so sorry,” I tell him through my tears.

  “Are you fucking stupid? A moron?” he says. Usually, I would stand up for myself. After all, it’s an accident. But I’m so distraught that I just keep crying.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just not feeling good,” I say. “Should we call the police?”

  “Call the police? Don’t you think they have better things to do?” he yells.

  We exchange insurance information. Then I continue my drive to the meeting, shaken and stunned. I feel like I’m losing myself. Clearly, my depth perception has changed. I shouldn’t drive anymore.

  After the accident, I feel the need to spend more time at home close to my children, so I start a new project. On Sunday afternoons, I invite friends and family members to come over and paint at our kitchen island that I cover with arts and crafts paper. I put out eight-by-nine-inch canvases, acrylic paints, and brushes, so that we can all sit around and paint while we talk and connect with each other. It’s the perfect day to eat my famous spaghetti Bolognese and drink our favorite wine. I’m honestly not a great cook, but my children think my Bolognese sauce is the best in the world. My plan is to create a big art wall in our house made by the people who are closest to me and my children. I am feeling a little disconnected from our new life in Malibu. I definitely miss 2347 East Valley Road and my vibrant life in Montecito, but I guess relocating your family is a big shift for anyone.

  That summer, David and I are invited on a boat trip to Italy hosted by our friends, Haim and Cheryl Saban, something we do every year with pretty much the same four or five couples. Even something simple like packing is becoming daunting, so I throw a pair of shorts, a few shirts, and some bathing suits into a suitcase and leave behind the beautiful pants, tops, and dresses that I normally bring. In Naples, we board a beautiful yacht, which has six bedrooms and a crew of fifteen. The first night, when our friends come down to the dining room for dinner, they’re all dressed perfectly while I’m in shorts and a T-shirt.

  “What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you dressed?” my friend Vicky asks when she sees me.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t pack right,” I say. Usually, we go for long walks and swims, but I’m so out of sorts that I can’t participate in much. I can’t even walk up the steps to the piazza in Capri where we used to love to have coffee in the morning. I feel completely shut down.

  Since before my wedding, I’ve been on a very strict diet. I cut out gluten, sugar, and alcohol because I wanted to be in great shape for my big day. Eating this way has proven to decrease a lot of unexplainable inflammation throughout my body but despite this, I’m on vacation and feel trapped and annoyed with my limited diet and decide to cut loose. For once, I’m going to eat and drink anything that my little heart desires. Sometimes you’ve just gotta let it fly. I am not feeling good anyway so who cares? I have pasta for lunch and dinner, happily indulge in irresistible white baguettes with delicious butter and olive oil, and enjoy the sweets that are available all day, every day. I am loving it but sadly the joy only lasts so long before I pay the price big-time. I wake up even more exhausted and bloated, and all my other symptoms are multiplied by ten. I realize that my diet is a very important part of whatever is going on with me. I go back to Malibu bloated and sick.

  On the last night of filming for the Housewives, we’re at a party to celebrate the opening of Kyle Richards’s clothing store. All my castmates are there. Apparently, Taylor Armstrong was talking behind my back, which I am learning is normal in this group but it doesn’t sit well with me. I’m a very straightforward person. If you have a problem, just tell me and we’ll go talk it out over a cup of coffee at Starbucks. I guess that’s the Dutch way to go. So I confront Taylor. She gets very heated and verbally attacks me. Normally, I’m outspoken, articulate, and very capable of standing up for myself. I can usually see all sides of a story and give my honest point of view. But to my surprise, I stand there with no opinion at all and am unable to defend myself. I’m scrambling in my head in a way that is hard to explain. I have no word retrieval and can’t form sentences. My memory is blank. It’s as if the scanner in my brain is broken. Taylor continues to ramble on and on without my response.

  Out of desperation, I blurt out, “You are such an asshole.” I’m not sure of her reaction, but I stun myself. Because my first language isn’t English, I’m extremely conscious of the words I choose, and I don’t even know if we have a word similar to “asshole” in Dutch. After the party, I get in the limo and burst into tears. I’m so overwhelmed and confused by the letdown of my own brain. It’s the moment that shakes and wakes me up. Something is really wrong with me. All the rest, healthy food, and fun in the world isn’t going to get me well.

  In the days that follow, I’m exhausted from traveling and letting go of the stress from my first season on the show. I made it through but don’t feel confident about the way I expressed myself. Still, I have five months to get well and hopefully do and feel better next season. My fatigue is so severe that it’s hard to walk from my bed to the bathroom. No matter how many hours I sleep, I’m totally wiped out. My migraines are unbearable, and I now have unexplainable night sweats and fever. My brain fog gets worse, so simple things like answering an e-mail become difficult tasks. I also have this strange feeling that my heart is always racing. It’s as if my body is stuck in a gear and my engine is always running. I’m too worn down to even go out or see friends. I feel like I’ve fallen off Planet Earth.

  In the early fall, I can barely get out of bed because I have a severe migraine. David rushes me to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai, one of the largest academic medical centers and best hospitals in the country. Dr. Piro meets us there, and I’m admitted. During a twelve-day stay at Cedars-Sinai, I’m absolutely turned inside out. They do an endoscopy, colonoscopy, upper panendoscopy with biopsy, PET scan, EEG, MRI of my brain, spinal tap, and an array of blood tests. They analyze my stool for pathogens and do cultures for all sorts of things, including fungus and yeast. I see internists, infectious disease doctors, gastroenterologists, neurologists, gynecologists, hematologists, endocrinologists, nutritionists, and more. I’m completely debilitated and can barely sit up to be examined. I just want to curl up in a fetal position until the doctors come in to meet me. Unfortunately, despite this army of top health experts, no one can give me a proper diagnosis or a cause for my pain and symptoms. We have access to the best medical minds out there, but it doesn’t mean anything if they don’t have the right diagnostic tools or knowledge. I often feel guilty for being so privileged and having all these helping hands, but unfortunately that privilege doesn’t mean anything when it comes to determining what is wrong with me.

  My mental decline is of the most concern to me, and during another neurological exam, I meet with Dr. Harris Fisk, a neurologist.

  “I’m going to list three objects that I’ll ask you about later,” Dr. Fisk tells me.

  “Okay,” I say. This sounds easy enough.

  “Apple, nickel, and calculator,” Dr. Fisk says. “Now, tell me a little bit about your symptoms.”

  “Brain fog, joint pain, severe
exhaustion, migraines. Sometimes my eyesight is bad.”

  “How long have you felt this way?” he asks.

  “Awhile. Probably two years now.”

  “Can you tell me the three objects?” Dr. Fisk asks. It’s been mere minutes since he listed them for me.

  “Apple,” I say. The other two are not even on the tip of my tongue. Dr. Fisk gives me several hints, but my mind is blank. He can tell how frustrated I am, so he moves on with the exam.

  “Who’s our president?”

  “Barack Obama.”

  “And our vice president?”

  “Joe Biden.”

  “Who’s the governor of California?” My mind is blank. I shake my head.

  “How about the mayor of Los Angeles?” Again, I have no clue. I feel the tears rolling down my cheeks because I feel so dumb. I’ve had DINNER with the mayor. How could I NOT remember his name?!

  “It’s okay,” Dr. Fisk says. “Let’s try something else. Start at one hundred and subtract by sevens.”

  “Ninety-three,” I say. Then I pause. Ordinarily, math comes easily to me, but this seems like an impossible task. Again, I shake my head.

  “Spell ‘world,’” he says.

  “W-O-R-L-D,” I reply. Phew.

  “Now backward,” he says, making notes in my file. I close my eyes and think, but I can’t find the letters. How could I be so stupid? Well, I know I am not stupid, but what am I? What IS this?

  “I just want my brain back,” I say out loud, as much to myself as to Dr. Fisk, while tears gently roll down my cheeks, not with sadness but with utter desperation and a sense of grief for the loss of the brain I once loved and was proud of.

  The next day, David reads Dr. Fisk’s examination notes out loud from my file that’s at the foot of my hospital bed: “There has been a major disruption in the patient’s lifestyle and ability to function. Clearly, she was functioning previously at multiple levels, performing a multitude of tasks which would ordinarily overwhelm most individuals.”

  I have a revolving door of visitors during my hospital stay. David comes by anytime he’s not in the studio, and my kids visit after school. Paige, Tom, Kelly, Paul, Mareva, Cheryl, and my sisters-in-law Jaymes and Mary-Lou come by so that I’m never alone. I’m not very good company, but they visit anyway, and I’m grateful for their love and concern. I can’t do much to pass the time besides sleeping because the light from the TV bothers me and the smallest sound—even the whir of a ceiling fan—irritates my brain. It’s like my hearing is heightened in an unexplainable way. One day when Tom visits, he moves his chair across the room as far as possible from my bed when I try to rest. He is listening to a Marianne Williamson lecture on his iPod. When I ask him to turn it down, he looks at me as if I am crazy because he has the volume as low as possible and is using his headphones, but my hearing is so acute that it sounds like a megaphone.

  I try to remain calm and positive, but I’m not going to lie—deep inside I’m starting to feel frustrated and scared to have such an unexplainable decline in my health. The doctors seem to have an excuse for every symptom but no real answers. They do the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay test, better known as the ELISA, and Western blot to test me for Lyme disease. These are the two Lyme tests that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recognizes. Both are considered “indirect” because they look for the antibodies that your body has made to fight the infection rather than the actual infection.

  “Your symptoms seem like Lyme disease, but your test results are negative,” says one of the infectious disease doctors at Cedars.

  After being poked and prodded, all they find is swelling in the left frontal lobe of my brain. This sounds serious, but the doctors don’t seem too concerned. Yet it makes me wonder if it has anything to do with the rings under my eyes that appear every three weeks and the severe migraines I have. Some say the swelling could be from all the flying and traveling I’ve been doing. All the flying? I’ve traveled much more at other times in my life and never felt this way. Other doctors say it’s age appropriate. But I’m only forty-eight. They find some cells of encephalitis in the fluid from my spinal tap and give me a week’s worth of antibiotics, but they feel this is from a past exposure. Whatever that means. Other tests reveal that I have positive IgG for Epstein-Barr and hepatitis B. IgG is an antibody that is a marker that shows you’ve had past exposures. However, I don’t have a positive IgM, which means I don’t have a current or active infection. Bottom line? The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with me, so they send me home with a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome and no real protocol or any idea of how to regain my health. I return to our Malibu home feeling totally defeated.

  I’m no doctor, but I put a lot of effort into being health-conscious and savvy. I know that chronic fatigue is not a disease but rather an umbrella of underlying causes, a term doctors use when they don’t know what’s wrong with you. This is BS. How many times do I have to tell the doctors that there’s an infection in my brain? I KNOW there is something living in there, but no one else does. Am I fucking crazy? I feel hopeless and confused as I land back in my bed, staring at the same ceiling and the same lightbulbs as I did twelve days ago. I lose the ability to properly read, write, and retain information, and it’s scary. My eyesight also starts to get worse. Although some days I can see normally, other days I have severe black floaters or everything looks blurry when I wake up in the morning.

  I’ve become a shell of the vivacious and outgoing woman I used to be and can no longer participate in my life. There are times when I feel inadequate for not being able to shake this, but I’m stuck and nothing is shifting. I joke with my kids that I should get the word “loser” tattooed on my forehead. I’m kidding, but that’s how it feels at times. I’m scared of the unknown. No matter how sick I am, I push David and the children to live their lives as usual. I want everyone to focus on themselves, not me. Of course, I like my husband’s company, but I don’t hold him back from his social life, charities, and events and would never ask him to cancel his frequent trips. I am supportive where I can be and continue to pick out his clothes for each day that he will be away, label them with the events he will wear them to, and put each outfit in a giant Ziploc bag. Blanca helps me put the bags in his suitcase. Even at my sickest, I try to be a good wife, because not doing anything makes me feel even more inadequate.

  The brightest spot in my day is seeing my children’s smiles at my bedside when they come home from school. It gets me through the long, monotonous hours of pain and waiting for a miracle to happen. Sometimes they crawl into bed with me and we snuggle and talk. They are my everything. If I can’t summon the energy to go down and eat with them at the kitchen table, they bring me dinner in bed. I try as hard as possible to put on a brave face and not share my fear or pain, because I never want to scare my kids. I also don’t want them to worry about me or feel guilty when they can’t be home all the time. We are all adjusting to this new normal.

  Chapter Three

  THE GREATER YOUR STORM, THE BRIGHTER YOUR RAINBOW.

  Although I am frustrated with my diagnosis of chronic fatigue because it does not resonate with me, Tom sees it differently. He has been by my side through many ups and downs in my life. So naturally, he is there when I get home from the hospital and need someone to think for and with me. I hope everyone is lucky enough to have a Tom in their life because I certainly am. He is smart with researching and making sense of all the medical information we have accumulated.

  “So if it’s chronic fatigue, we have the road to recovery,” Tom says with optimism in his voice. He is referring to the fact that, back when he was an agent, another one of his clients was the successful model and actress Maren Jensen. All of a sudden, she disappeared from the modeling scene because she got very sick with chronic fatigue. Years later Maren created a makeup company that she ended up selling for millions. She used her wealth for chronic fatigue research and has spent the last twenty-five years meeting with doctors all over the w
orld to find a cure. Tom calls her immediately.

  “The world’s top chronic fatigue doctor is in Belgium. Dr. Kenny De Meirleir,” Maren says. “Let me call and see if I can get you an appointment.”

  “I really think this is where we should go, and I will take you,” Tom says. Before I can even respond, he’s looking into flights.

  David is busy and doesn’t understand why I am not satisfied with this diagnosis, so I call my confidant, Paul Marciano, who always gives me the most practical advice whenever I can’t see it for myself. He and I became instant friends the day we met twenty-three years ago. Although it’s hard to explain, we had an immediate connection. He is like a big brother who took me under his wing and has never let go. We have celebrated marriages, supported one another through divorce, and raised our children together. His opinion means a lot to me.

  “Petite fleur,” he says, using the endearing French phrase that means “little flower.” “If it feels right to you, go for it. Let me help with the airline tickets. I have tons of miles.”

  Everything seems to be falling into place. Even though I can barely get out of bed, going to Belgium feels right in my gut. It’s also on the border of Holland, so I’ll be able to see my mom and brother. That thought alone is motivating. However, David thinks I’m crazy.

  “America has the best doctors in the world,” he says, when I tell him about Dr. De Meirleir. Of course, this is a totally normal reaction, and before this journey I felt the same exact way. I thought America had the best of the best. But none of them have been able to help me so far. I am hopeful that I’ll find answers in Europe, close to my hometown. Tom and I book our trip to Belgium.

  A few friends ask why David isn’t going with me. I tell them, and myself, that he is too busy and can’t take a week off from recording in the studio. I have a tremendous amount of respect for his work ethic and think this is a legitimate excuse. That said, if the shoe was on the other foot, I wouldn’t leave his side. When we met five years ago, I called him my “diamond in the rough.” He needed polishing, and I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I put him on a healthy diet, helped him lose twenty-five pounds, redid his wardrobe, and never missed one of his doctors’ appointments. I was obsessed, in a good way, with his health regimen and kept careful notes on my iPhone of all his medications, doctors, checkups, and test results. I realize now that what I did for David doesn’t come naturally to him. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman and I was born to nurture. I do believe that David cares for me to the best of his ability, and to be honest I am not really demanding of him. As a new bride, I am cautious about burdening him with too many of my issues. I feel very lucky to have Alberto and Blanca’s help. They will keep the house running while I’m in Belgium. They have now gotten used to taking my children to their after-school activities and keeping their busy lives going as I fade out of mine. I know I shouldn’t, but I feel a lot of guilt about not being able to perform my duties as a mom and wife. I take these responsibilities very seriously and often allow these thoughts to put too much pressure on me. I need my house and family to continue to hum along smoothly while I try to figure out my health crises. The more normalcy they have, the less pressure I feel.