Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [101]
Terry first became ill just at the time we were thrust into a life that I’ve described like this: You’re standing next to a treadmill that’s already on seven. You jump on, and you’re at a full dead sprint—for the next four years. So Terry’s disease began at the very moment of all the tension and pace of living in this limelight.
I didn’t know what it was like. I sat her down one day and said, “This is alien to me. Please tell me what this does.” She said, “It’s like when I’m shopping, all of a sudden I feel it coming on and my purse now weighs fifty pounds. I don’t even know if I can carry it to the car. I feel like I’m going to collapse.”
Her Epstein-Barr mono had gone untreated long enough that it turned into chronic fatigue syndrome. Except doctors didn’t then know what it was. They didn’t believe it was real, and it wasn’t being diagnosed until a few years ago.
TERRY: The terrible thing about chronic fatigue, too, is that it wipes out your short-term memory. Our whole marriage, whenever we went anywhere, I always remembered everyone’s names and faces. Jesse was never good at that, and I was like an encyclopedia. Now all of a sudden I would meet someone and an hour later, have no idea who they were.
When the two of us reached the decision that he wasn’t going to run again, I just disappeared from public view.
His last year in office, Jesse then had to be hospitalized, and things seemed like they were going from bad to worse.
Three times in my life, I’ve had to be hospitalized because of a blood clot on my lungs. The last time it happened was on the return trip from my trade mission to China, after taking that thirteen-hour plane ride. Today, I’ve learned some people who fly a lot are susceptible to this. Now I get up every hour and walk around the plane, so my blood isn’t allowed to pool down in my feet.
After getting home from China, I noticed I had some pain whenever I took a deep breath, so I went to the hospital and they discovered the clot with an MRI. After I was admitted, I didn’t want this getting out to the media, because it’s frankly none of their business. The hospital was tremendous. They kept me in an isolated ward and, the day I left, the reporters were all out front where my limousine was, while they snuck me out the back door. The state troopers put me in an unmarked squad car, and I left the media sitting there. I never did speak to them about it.
I then went to the Mayo Clinic and they found out that something in my immune system is messed up that causes my blood to clot when it shouldn’t. I’ll need to take Coumadin, a blood thinner, for life now.
TERRY: Finally, almost a year after Jesse was out of office, I went to a great clinic that works with cancer patients. That’s still what I was afraid I had. A group of doctors were treating the patients holistically, metabolically, not just with all these heavy drugs. My girlfriend had gone there when doctors kept telling her the same thing—“you’re just stressed”—and it turned out she had Crohn’s disease. Now she’s a whole new person because she’s been treated for it. All this time, I’d been treating myself the wrong way for the chronic fatigue syndrome that I really had. I remember a doctor at the clinic saying, “I can’t believe no one has told you this before.” I sat there thinking, “Oh my God, I’m not going to die.”
The only thing you can do when it comes over you is rest. All I wanted was for Terry to regain her health. I knew that if I became governor for another four years, God knows where it would have put her.
Terry had the highest approval rating that any First Lady in Minnesota has ever achieved—76 percent. Even when I would make these huge faux pas, stick my foot right in the shit bucket with something I said, it didn’t affect her popularity. The people adored her, because she was so honest in everything