Tipping Point

Seven years ago, on a trip to Vietnam, I stepped into the warm water at Nha Trang beach, eager to relish my first swim in the South China Sea. But I didn't get very far: a knee-high wave—hardly a wave at all—instantly toppled me. As I tried to stand, my legs buckled, and my traveling partner had to help me up. Besides feeling off-kilter, I was perplexed. A devoted lap swimmer for 15 years, I had powerful legs that propelled me past many younger men at the pool. Now all my strength seemed drained away, washed out to sea by foreign currents.

As sand and foam swirled around me, I wondered if the rice wine mixed with turtle blood, served by my Vietnamese hosts the night before, had made me sick. Or was I merely overcome by a case of extreme travel fatigue? Reassured by my health-conscious regimen—lean diet, vigorous exercise and meditation—I dismissed thoughts of anything more serious. Both sides of my family boasted hardy long-lifers. My great-grandmother chopped wood until she was 85, then quit out of boredom. A year earlier, when I was 39, my doctor had given me a physical and declared, "You're still considered a young man."

But then I took another inexplicable spill in Vietnam. As I rose from my seat in a village café, my legs failed again. Out of stubbornness and denial, I didn't seek medical attention until returning to California, two weeks after my first fall at the beach.

Back at home, I could barely stand in the emergency room. My legs and hands were entirely numb. The ER doctor concluded that I'd contracted an exotic virus in Asia. "I'll have the infectious disease specialist call you," he said, signing my discharge papers. No one ever called. The next day I fell on my face when the lower half of my body seemed to evaporate without warning.

Using my weakened arms, I managed to push myself up from the floor. I called my friend Luci, whose twin sister Judi is a pediatrician. Luci took notes, relayed the information to her sister and called me back an hour later. "Judi says it might be Guillain-Barré syndrome," she said. "And if it is, it's serious." Luci had spelled out the unfamiliar words, which sounded, to me, like the name of a French-Canadian pop star. Ghee-yawn Bah-ray. I searched the Internet and found stories that mirrored my own: numb limbs, muscle weakness, decimated stamina and sudden falls. Guillain-Barré, I learned, was a rare disorder in which the body's immune system goes haywire and attacks the peripheral nerves, thwarting conductivity to and from the brain. Patients with the most severe cases suffer permanent paralysis or require respirators.

One online bulletin board contained tale after tale of misdiagnosis. In 2003 a team of immunologists published a retrospective diagnosis of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Journal of Medical Biography concluding that FDR probably had Guillain-Barré, not polio as previously thought.