Believe Me

by Yolanda Hadid

  “Please, Mom,” she’d reason with me when she was in her early teens. “There are lots of fourteen-year-olds who model. Why can’t I?”

  “Trust me, angel. I’ve lived in that business most of my life. I understand it on many different levels that you won’t get right now. But one day, you will,” I’d say. “Before I expose you to a world where people judge you on the way that you look, I need you to develop a strong sense of self-worth and understand exactly who it is that you are. It’s the only way to survive. Let’s focus on your sports and work on being the best you can be.”

  Now, Gigi is almost eighteen, so it’s time to keep my promise. She is dead set on fulfilling her dream, and I’m dead set on holding up my end of the bargain. Last year, I organized several test photo shoots for her with different photographers so she could start building her portfolio. I also researched the top five agencies in New York and made appointments to meet with them. Before we leave L.A., I learn to run my own IVs, connect my antibiotics, and flush my port with saline and heparin so that I can travel.

  We stay at a cute little hotel in downtown Manhattan. On our first day, we’re scheduled to meet with the modeling agencies. While Gigi is getting ready in the bathroom, she looks over at me.

  “Mommy, what if nobody likes me today?” she asks.

  “Gigi, please don’t worry about that, just be you,” I say. “You’ve got all it takes to be whatever you choose to be, my love. And remember: you’re not going to work for them; they’re going to work for you.” I want her to feel in charge of this exciting expedition we’re going on. We’re finally here and we’re going to have an amazing day. It’s intimidating to walk into a big agency like IMG where you don’t know anyone, but we’ve prepared for this. Gigi is a shy and reserved version of herself, but engaging, charming, and talkative when she meets David Cunningham and Lisa DiRuocco from IMG’s development. Afterward we have a nice lunch and meet with four smaller agencies that afternoon. By evening, we are walking arm in arm back to the hotel, exhausted but happy. It was a beautiful day and now the sun has set and a warm spring wind blows through my hair. Regardless of how I’m feeling physically, emotionally, I feel so fulfilled for keeping this promise to my little girl.

  “That was so great, Mommy,” Gigi says. “But what if I don’t get offers from any of them?”

  “Don’t worry, my love. Just wait until tomorrow.”

  We go out for dinner with Tom and David’s manager, Marc Johnston, at the Spice Market, a restaurant right across the street from our hotel, and Gigi excitedly shares her day with our family friends. We talk about the different agencies and the people we met, some of whom I used to work with at Eileen Ford’s agency.

  The next morning, we wake up to four offers in my e-mail in-box. Of course, we scream with excitement. We order room service and discuss her options.

  “I’d rather be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond,” I say. I’m kind of leaning toward a smaller, boutique agency, where I think she will have more personal attention—especially since she’ll be so far away from home that first year. I’m just trying to protect my baby from being lost in a big place. Then again, it doesn’t really matter what I say. It’s the beginning of her journey, not mine, and she needs to use her own intuition in this decision and feel the human connection she made at the agencies.

  “I’m going with IMG. I knew that was my place from the second we walked into their office yesterday,” she tells me, referring to the biggest modeling agency in the world. I’m not surprised that she ends up doing exactly the opposite of what I suggest, and I’m certainly not surprised by her ability to make this decision. That’s just who Gigi is.

  “I support you one hundred percent in your choice, my love,” I say. “Now, let’s focus on the serious business.” Gigi is graduating high school in June and was accepted to the New School to study criminal psychology. From a very young age, maybe five or six, Gigi was completely intrigued by crime shows on TV. She didn’t just watch dramas like Law & Order but also loved hard-core murder mysteries and felt the need to understand why one human being could kill another. I always thought it was fascinating that her little mind was intrigued by this so I nurtured it and as she became older it became clear to me that criminal psychology was really something that she wants to explore and learn about. Going to college in the fall and working as a model on her days off, holidays, and maybe weekends will be a perfect combination. Education is very important but I also want her to be completely financially independent by the time she is twenty-one. We tour the New School and I can see her excitement about the thought of a life on campus. It’s a hectic week, and I get through it on pure adrenaline and my determination to keep the commitments I made to my child. I consciously put a smile on my face as I push through my physical symptoms. These are such important moments for Gigi, and I’m not going to let any disease take that away from her! Most mothers would do the same—a mother’s love is so strong that it gives us magic powers that exceed anything.

  It’s around day sixty-five of my antibiotics when we get back from New York, yet I’m nowhere close to feeling normal. I want to believe that ninety days will do the job, but, as I approach the finish line, I start to worry that this might not be the case. What am I going to do now? Reality is starting to set in. Being in New York was a humbling reminder of what I am not.

  I need to contemplate my next plan of attack. A couple of days later, out of the blue, I get an e-mail from my friend Suzanne Somers, who tells me that her fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Violet, was treated and cured of chronic Lyme at the Sponaugle Wellness Institute in Florida. Tom is visiting on his way back to his mom’s house up north, and the word “cure” has us researching the clinic immediately. They treat Lyme and autoimmune conditions using both holistic and Western medicine. When Tom calls Sponaugle, they tell him that the program is six weeks long. Six weeks? How can I take that much time out of my life? Then again, what life am I referring to? I really don’t have a life. If it wasn’t for my responsibilities, I would probably never leave my bed. At this point David and the kids are getting used to me living in my room most of the time. They often jump in bed with me and discuss their days like it’s normal. I guess it is our new normal, but I’m starting to feel isolated and detached from my world more and more each day. The kids must sense this because they surprise me with a new iPhone. They convince me that I need Twitter and Instagram accounts and patiently teach my slow brain how to use them. I learn to love this new phone because it becomes my only link to the outside world.

  At times, I’m so frustrated by being trapped in my body that I have a meltdown and bawl my eyes out, of course when my kids aren’t around. Yet eventually the Dutch warrior comes out and I get back to researching my options for killing these horrible spirochetes that are living in my brain and clearly show their three-week cycles in my face. I know Dr. De Meirleir said ninety days was only the beginning of this but his words are now becoming a reality.

  This is unbelievable! Why isn’t this a cure? Why isn’t there a black-and-white answer? Why does everybody seem to have a different opinion about this mysterious disease? Why is this such a mystery? My mind is screaming with unanswered questions, but instead of getting angry, I grow more quiet and introverted as time passes.

  One of the rare joys during this time is to see that I raised three children whose empathy for others runs deep and how quickly they learn to take control in even the worst situations. You don’t really know what your children are made of until the mommy engine of the family shuts down and they’re forced to help out. One night when David is out of town, I have one of these excruciating migraines that my medication can’t fade. The pain is intolerable and I can’t stop crying. At eleven o’clock, Gigi calls Dr. Piro.

  “Bring her to the emergency room at St. John’s and I’ll meet you there,” he tells her.

  After Bella gets me dressed and Anwar helps me down the stairs, Gigi drives the four of us to the hosp
ital. My kids wait patiently and don’t leave my side. Dr. Piro treats my unexplainable and severe pain syndrome with morphine, which makes it dissipate, and steroids, which reduce the inflammation in my brain. I’m discharged the next morning. This is just one example of how truly amazing my kids are and how they step up in their own authentic ways, tapping into their resourcefulness while bringing such different strengths to the table. I feel so much gratitude for who they are. It’s a crazy good feeling beyond anything I’ve ever felt. They truly are the sweet spot in my life, my sugar.

  Soon I have to get back to work on the Housewives and I’m still not well, so going to Sponaugle in Florida is really my only chance of possibly putting myself back together. After all, staring at the ceiling of my bedroom is not getting me anywhere. I try hard to be practical and talk myself into doing what is right.

  Still, the thought of leaving my children and David for six weeks weighs heavily on me. The longest I’ve been away from Gigi, Bella, and Anwar is a week or two when they went on their summer vacations with their dad. Leaving them is the last thing I want to do right now. I will feel so naked without them, but what other choice do I have at this point? I know that I should be counting my blessings for the options available to me. I call everyone down for a family meeting in the kitchen.

  “I hate to leave you,” I tell them, my voice shaking as I try not to cry. “But I’m not feeling better yet, and I need to keep searching until I find a cure.”

  “It’s okay, Mommy. We have a lifetime together,” Bella says sweetly as she puts her arms around me.

  “Don’t worry. We’re going to be fine,” Gigi adds. “We just need you to get better.”

  “Dr. Sponaugle has cured so many people with Lyme,” says Anwar, my little researcher, who’s already checked out the Web site. Together we decide that this is the right thing to do for now.

  I try not to let the kids see me crack, because I don’t want them to take on my stress or worry about this any more than they have to. I want to be tough and give them strength. But the truth is, they give me strength. At this moment, when I don’t want to leave them, they’re my driving force, because I can’t imagine what their lives would look like without me. So I better get my ass in gear and keep shooting for the stars until I hit one.

  The good news is that Paige decides to go with me, since several rounds of oral antibiotics have not cured her Lyme, either. My sister-in-law Jaymes, who also has chronic Lyme, is coming, too, but she’ll arrive a week after we do. Jaymes was originally infected in 1990 and supposedly treated with a short course of antibiotics. So it’s not clear whether her Lyme came back last summer or if she got bit again when she was in Canada. Either way, multiple rounds of antibiotics didn’t do anything. At one point, her health failed so much that she could barely work.

  Tom sends all my medical files to Dr. Rick Sponaugle, and, next thing I know, Paige and I are curbside at LAX. If it weren’t for David’s organization, I don’t think I would have made it to the airport on time this morning. Traveling with all these medications is a huge undertaking. A lot of them need to stay refrigerated while others need to be frozen, so it’s complicated, especially in my mind.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” Paige says when she sees me.

  “Do what?” I ask.

  “You look like a breath of fresh air in your blue leather jacket, matching blue sunglasses, and royal blue scarf,” she says. “No one would know that you have a port in your chest under that ensemble!” She is right. It’s day seventy-eight of my antibiotics.

  “You don’t even look sick!” she adds. We laugh because we know that’s the irony of Lyme: you look good on the outside while dying on the inside. That’s why they call it an invisible disease. Paige is smiling, but I know her so well and can tell that she is struggling. Frustrated with her memory loss, she keeps repeating herself over and over again. My brain is so shut down that I can’t process her story once, let alone three times.

  Four hours into the flight, I’m in a lot of pain. I’m so uncomfortable with nausea, my eyes burn, and I feel as if something is crawling under my skin. My brain feels inflamed and off balance. My tongue is covered in a white layer of yeast, and my gut has become very unhappy with the seventy-eight-day rampage of antibiotics. It almost seems as if the side effects of the medicine are becoming worse than the disease itself. At least it feels like that right now. Flying is just not my friend. I can’t wait to land and get to my hotel bed, stretch my aching body, and sleep for a thousand hours. Sleeping has become harder and harder, because even during the night I consciously experience pain. There is no escaping.

  Finally, we arrive in Florida and Paige drives our rental car to the hotel, which is near the clinic. Neither of us sleeps well, but we wake up excited about the possibility of healing at Sponaugle. By now, I’ve tried so many different protocols without success. I pray that this one is different. When we arrive, the place is buzzing. The treatment room is filled with at least sixty patients, all with IV drips, and nurses, who are darting around, busily changing needles, drawing blood, and preparing concoctions. Then, I am whisked into an office where I meet my personal nurse, Dennis. Sweet Dennis. He asks me to fill out some paperwork and answer questions about any missing health information that is not in the medical records that Tom sent in advance. Next, I’m brought in to see Dr. Sponaugle. He appears to be a genius whose treatments and ideas are outside the box. During my appointment, I can sense not only his excitement about healing but also his underlying frustration with the world of traditional medicine. His brain goes a million miles an hour, and with my current mental comprehension it’s hard for me to follow. Yet he has diagrams on his wall detailing the biochemical reactions of toxins in the gut and the brain. I find his knowledge fascinating and he makes me feel hopeful.

  “When you hit most bacteria with antibiotics, they die. But chronic Lyme bacteria are so smart and strong that they create a biofilm around themselves that antibiotics cannot penetrate,” he explains. “This is why many people have little improvement from them.”

  “So what do you do?” I ask.

  “To successfully treat Lyme, you need to kill the bacteria and biofilm,” he says. After eighty days of battling severe toxic reactions, twelve days in the hospital, three trips to the emergency room, and six months of staring at the ceiling, it kind of makes sense. I’m dealing with a monster, and he is making me see that I’m not just fighting Lyme. There are many more pieces to this healing pie.

  Treatments at Sponaugle include very systematic IV drips, where they rotate “kill drips,” which attack the bacteria, and “detox IVs,” which pull out the debris of dead bugs. They also do ozone, colonics, and coffee enemas, among many other things, and all of them are carefully thought through and tracked with weekly blood tests. Paige has a severe reaction to one of her first IV kill drips, and I can see the fear in her eyes.

  “So how are you liking your first date with Mr. Herxheimer?” I say.

  “It’s hell,” she says.

  “You’re going to be okay. I promise.”

  “I trust you,” she says.

  “Pull up the bootstraps, cowboy!” She smiles back at me weakly. It’s interesting that people are starting to look to me for answers and advice about a disease that I’m still trying to figure out: not only my friends, Paige and Jaymes, but also hundreds of people who contact me each week by e-mail, social media, and the Bravo Web site with questions.

  Several of my treatments at Sponaugle make me feel worse. But nothing compares with the reactions I battled during the initial days and weeks of antibiotics at home. I’m starting to get educated about many things, and I can tell you that as much as I hate having a tube up my ass, I’m pretty sure that these colonics are one of my lifesavers. I can feel the toxins that have accumulated in my body but I never knew that the only way to detoxify is through sweat, pee, and poo. I never realized that when I stopped exercising, I stopped sweating. I’ve suffered from chronic constipation since e
arly childhood, so I am just now learning that flushing out this toxic waste is crucial to my healing. I thank God for Bonnie Barrett, who gently teaches me the art of a good and peaceful colonic and the importance of coffee enemas for detoxification purposes to increase bile production and flow. I’ve never heard of anyone putting coffee up their butt, but I’m open to anything and everything at this point as I slowly learn to surrender. Chiropractic treatments are another important part of the Sponaugle protocol because they believe that a healthy spine helps your immune system.

  The treatment days are a full-time job, and I approach them like one. After six- or seven-hour days at the clinic, I go back to the hotel, shower, and crash into bed feeling totally exhausted, only to wake up and start all over again the next day. Though my life might suck right now, I am not complaining. I still have a hundred reasons to be grateful. I talk to my best friend, Ellie, almost every day and her ALS is always a great reminder to count my lucky stars that I am still able to get out of bed.

  Paige and I usually order Reuben sandwiches from the deli across the street from the clinic. Strangely, my body is craving sauerkraut. Most of the time, we skip dinner because we’re too tired, and sleeping is the fastest way to pass time. It sounds silly but right now I just want time to go as fast as possible so I can get home where I belong.