Woman of AIDS, Mother of Panic

Submitted for the approval of the Memoir Society, I call this story "Woman of AIDS, Mother of Panic"

My mother thought she had AIDS in the early 1990's.

You have to know my mother for that to sound like the insanity that it truly is. My mother, while never dull, has never risen to the level that AE felt like they needed to have an intervention. Plus, she's only been with a few people. We've never had that particular talk, but I think a few glasses of wine and I could get the number out of her. Suffice it to say, she didn't share heroin needles or have unprotected anal sex for kicks.

But, it was a scary time. And she was a new mom. She had gone from the summer of 1988 when she didn't have a care in the world but her husband and her career. She could take off at a moment's notice to go away for the weekend, hit the beach, run the side bets at a fishing tournament, politically campaign for someone, join a charismatic church, bless out a liar, and still be at home in time to catch the evening news with my father. This changed, though, and in the summer of 1990, she had two very large, very heavy, very demanding children. My brother and I required a special amount of looking after.

It got to the point that we were living on a farm out in the middle of nowhere, sticksville, USA in south Georgia. The nearest grocery store was thirty miles away. Our farmhouse would be dusted by crop dusters (post DDT, but not by too much) everyday. And that freaked my mother out. As did having these two little aliens all to herself all day long everyday. As did being removed by a few hundred miles from all of her friends and her life in Panama City, Florida. As did the animosity between my brother and I. Even at eighteen months, I didn't appreciate the new alien (my little brother, Mason) that had imposed himself in my family situation, and I was not above shoving him out of the way to get what I wanted.

To give you an idea of how isolated my mother was, she was thirty miles from the nearest grocery store. Imagine having to haul two babies into a van for a trip to the grocery store, pushing them around, getting food for a family of four in a buggy that has a car seat in it to hold the infants, and all of the work that that implies. Now, my mother wasn't one of those women living on the Great Plains in a house mad of sod that occasionally had a snake fall out of the roof, but it was an ordeal.

Anyway, back in the early 1990's, they didn't know what this little thing called "Anxiety Disorder" was. My mother, however, had it. In spades. She had her first panic attack in a Hardee's drive-through on the way back from the grocery store with my brother and me. All she could think was "I can't breathe, and I'm going to die in this damn drive-through in front of my babies." She calmed down, finally got her breath back, got a Diet Coke in the drive through, and went home, hunched over the wheel. When she turned on to the dirt road where our farm house was, she was white knuckling it. She just wanted to get the groceries inside, put the kids down for a nap, and figure out what was wrong with her.

Well, at this same time, my father's parents had a condo in Panama City, and my family would go visit them a few times a month. One day, one of my grandfather's friends was this GP named Harry. Harry would come down to Panama City, stay with my grandparents, and go fishing on some of Granddaddy Mack's boats. Back in this age before HIPAA, healthcare reform, malpractice, and all that jazz, my mother got all of her medical check-ups pro bono from granddaddy's friends. So, Harry was looking over my mom.

He looked at my mom, glancing her over, ran a normal blood test, and sat her down. My mother had lost about two stone (somewhere near thirty pounds) in the previous two years, which is abnormal, considering all she did was look after children. She should have, in theory, gained weight...it isn't a reigstered diet secret that you lose weight by watching Santa Barbara. However, she looked like she was wasting away, her vitality and color draining fromher face. So, he told her that she probably had AIDS and she should prepare herself and her family for the inevitable test results.

My mother freaked out. This was during an era when AIDS testing took two weeks. When it had only recently been reclassified from GRID. When the disease was less than ten years old. When it wasn't an international health concern. When you thought you could get it from anywhere, and that was partly true. Now, my mother is a smart woman, but when he told her that she might be full-blown AIDS, she thought "Possible."

She had only been married to my father for a few years, so it might have come through her previous sexual partners. Or, she might have received it in a transfusion (my mother had cancer twice and broke her neck within a two year span at this same time, but those are other stories for other days). It was a scary time, and she couldn't say for sure that she was clean. Which made the next two weeks terrifying.

Over the next two weeks, my mother had at least one panic attack a day. Her throat would swell, she'd hyperventilate, and she would be constantly on edge, her nerves shot by the end of the evening. She was sure that she was going to die and abandon her family that she had worked so hard to gain.

They called her back two weeks later: negative. But the damage was done. My mother had developed an anxiety syndrome that was so bad, she couldn't make regular doctor's appointments. And because it went undiagnosed, it kept getting worse. And my mother kept losing weight.

In this pre-internet age, her godsend appeared in the form of Sixty Minutes. They ran a special on this new, very real disorder called "Anxiety Syndrome." And my mother had all the symptoms. She turned to my father and said, "That's what I have. That's what's wrong with me." She misted up a little. She wasn't having a panic attack then, but she was experiencing a common catharsis seen in hospitals everyday: even though the prognosis isn't good, it's comforting to be able to put a name to your enemy.

She went later that week and interviewed with a neurologist and got a positive diagnosis and some pills (Cerzone, my mother says, is the best drug ever produced. A pinch under the tongue could quell a hurricane). She started to gain the weight back, nearly as inexplicably as she lost it. But, thinking back, she figured it out.

Left alone with two children and this medical condition she didn't understand that made her choke, she wouldn't eat when she was alone because she was afraid of choking, falling over, passing out, dying, and my dad walking into my cries and my brother's empty stare as we huddled near our mother's cooling corpse. I might have inherited my hint of the macabre from her. So, she only ate dinner with my father every night. She was trying to keep up with two infants on roughly 600 calories a day. Some anorexics do better than that. No wonder she looked like she was falling apart.

After she regained her strength, Dottie made an appointment to see Dr. Harry. When he walked into his office and found her, she cussed him out for fifteen solid minutes at the top of her lungs. His exam rooms were full. Nurses scurried into other rooms. People peered out of rooms. When she finally stormed out, she went to my grandmother and told her what she had done.

"Good for you," was all Grandma Helen said. And strangely, Dr. Harry never went fishing with my grandparents ever again.