“Eat some peanut butter, Ally,” my brother Richard chimed in from the peanut gallery. “You probably just need to shit.”

  “I think I’ll try the bath first,” I said.

  Sitting in the bath didn’t do anything. I called my dad back.

  “Wake Patrick up,” he said decisively. “Tell him to call an ambulance.”

  Ten minutes later, two paramedics with a gurney and a police officer entered the room. They started interrogating Patrick with questions. I think they thought he was abusing me since I was crying and screaming when he was on the phone calling for help. The poor guy could barely stand up straight, let alone abuse anybody!

  We both made it to the hospital in the ambulance and I was going nuts. The pain was worse than ever. I started to get really scared.

  They hooked me up to an IV drip of some sort of drug to ease the pain and calm me down. It worked after about forty-five minutes. They also injected my veins with that terrible burning contrast fluid before they put me into the CT scanner.

  Three hours later, after sleeping on and off, and hearing a child in the sectional next to me screaming in his own agony, I was glad when the doctor walked in.

  “Miss Hilfiger,” she began, “you have kidney stones. Two of them.”

  At this juncture, my poor friend Patrick had to go back to the hotel to tend to his food poisoning. He wanted to stay with me but I told him to go. I was so out of it on painkillers and sleeping on and off, I didn’t need a babysitter.

  I don’t remember how many hours later, the hospital finally released me and I took a taxi back to the Atlantis.

  The next day happened to be my birthday. Before we got on the plane to fly back to the States, I was feeling better (the prescription drugs had kicked in), and I wanted to at least see some of the aquariums that Atlantis has to offer. Behind two-inch-thick glass floated an array of magical sea creatures. I so badly wanted to morph into one of those fish and just float and soar past everyone in a blissful state.

  Patrick asked if I would ever move to South Carolina, but I politely declined, explaining that New York would always be my home. When I got back to New York, my family had a little birthday dinner and cake waiting at my dad’s apartment. By this time I had passed both stones.

  The best birthday ever!

  twenty-six

  THE GERMAN PROTOCOL

  “As I often tell patients, Lyme disease usually does not kill you the way AIDS does, but it often makes you wish you were dead.”

  —DR. RAPHAEL STRICKER, A PAST PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL LYME AND ASSOCIATED DISEASES SOCIETY

  I knew in the deepest recesses of my soul that I didn’t have many more tries left in me. In a half-dozen years I’d gone to eight Lyme doctors, who had prescribed that many treatments and more. Each time I’d walk out of their offices with my hopes high, and each time I’d see them dashed.

  I decided I would give me myself one more try to get better. One more try to have the life of which I had always dreamed.

  And so the day came when I knew I really had to take charge of this disease—for the last time.

  The process would not be easy. I knew there were a lot of moving pieces involved, as well as a lot of needles, which I loathed. I knew there was a lot of discipline and structure to which I needed to adhere. I knew there would be mountains to climb, rivers to forge, and rings of fire to walk through. But I was ready.

  A few weeks before my birthday in February 2010, I called the German who claimed to have a 100 percent success rate.

  The German’s name (doctor No. 10) was Dr. Thomas K. Szulc (pronounced “Schulz”). Sheila Cox, my dad’s longtime, trusted assistant, and our longtime friend and makeup artist, Katrina Borgstrom, had told us how terrific Szulc was. I walked into his Manhattan office with my dad. I remember it was Fashion Week, or just after. I wore an oversize vintage Yves Saint Laurent red blouse, waist high, size 24, skinny jeans (that were baggy on me), YSL platform hiking boots, and a faux fur scarf. Though I was in full Fashion Week attire, I was a wreck and in tears. There were rumors on the Internet that I had some sort of eating disorder or cocaine habit, since I had become so thin. It wasn’t coke or anorexia that was deteriorating my body. It was Lyme disease.

  In the waiting room, Dad and I met a woman named Diane Blanchard, who would become a beacon of hope for me. Along with Debbie Siciliano, Diane was the cofounder of Time for Lyme, which, as I said, became Global Lyme Alliance. They are my very dear friends. I call them my fairy godmothers.

  A bit disheveled, the doctor gave me the impression he didn’t care much for his outward appearance, but something about him felt magical to me. I remember when he listened to my heart with his stethoscope I began to cry. I became emotional, as if I knew he could heal with his hands. He was quietly compassionate. He explained to my father and me that his treatments could cure the effects of Lyme disease if you followed the program exactly. His theory was actually brilliant. He gave the analogy that your body is like a house. If the house has been dirty and toxic for a long while, and if you have exterminated (with antibiotics), then you still have dead bodies lying around and dirt under the rug. “You must scrub your house thoroughly and clean it completely and remove the bodies” (meaning the spirochetes).

  “Then we go in and boost the immune system and bring every system back to optimal health.”

  Made sense. More sense than anything else. I do really well with visuals.

  As we were leaving, Diane was in the waiting room with one of her daughters, who was going through a horrible bought of Lyme disease and doing the German protocol. They gave me a lot of faith that this might actually work.

  Though I’d talked myself into being a hardened Lyme warrior, and I knew there was no quick fix in treating the disease, my heart still sank when the doctor told me how long I would be on the treatments: For four months, and multiple times a week, I’d have to visit his office. I knew I had to try, but I also knew I couldn’t do it alone. I was twenty-five years old and I was too proud to ask for my parents to help me, or move back in with them.

  When I was growing up, my cousin Jaimie and I were more like twin sisters than cousins. We are six and a half months apart in age. We used to joke that we were like Patty and Kathy, from The Patty Duke Show. We would prank-call the dELiA*s catalog using different voices, like Marisa Tomei’s in the film My Cousin Vinny: “My boyfriend he doesn’t like when I wear poiple. Ya have red?”

  As life tends to get in the way of making phone calls and keeping in touch with the ones you love, I hadn’t spoken to Jaimie in some months. I was nervous to call her. It was not easy for me to ask people for help, especially the kind of help I now needed. Jaime and I also have an inside joke that when we are calling someone we pray that instead of them answering we get their answering machine. When the phone was held up to our ears, we used to chant, “Answering machine, answering machine, answering machine!”

  This time, I was not chanting. I was praying that she would pick up.

  She did.

  “Jaimie, the Lyme is back,” I said as hard tears began to well in my eyes. “I need to try something new, but it is going to take a lot, and I can’t do it by myself.”

  “I was waiting for your call. You have been on my mind so much lately. I had no idea how much Lyme people suffer until I spoke to a friend who is a nutritionist about it. I didn’t realize how much you have really been through. I can’t imagine, Ally.

  “What do you need me to do?” she asked.

  “I need you to come to New York,” I said. “I need help getting through these treatments.”

  “Done.” Jaimie was on the plane to New York the next week. She left her whole life in California behind. She put her successful modeling career on hold to help her sick, helpless cousin. Bless her heart forever. She is truly an angel.

  When I scheduled my first appointment with Manhattan Advanced Medicine, the home of Dr. Szulc, I was given a “detox diet” that meant no caffeine, no alcohol, no tobacco, no dairy of any kind, no refined sugar, meat only once a week, no wheat, bran, or oats, and nothing processed or packaged. I could eat all the fruit and veggies I wanted. Yikes. No fun. I was told I’d have to stay on the diet for many, many weeks. That sucked. But I had to do it, so I said good-bye everything yummy, gluttonous, and fun.

  Jaimie accompanied me to my first doctor’s appointment, where we met Lisa, the head nurse. Lisa was in her forties and had gray hair. She was tough, all business, but gave me the impression that she believed in the treatment with all her heart, but only if properly and precisely followed. Precise is the operative word.

  As it happened, Dr. Szulc wouldn’t treat me. He’d resigned his practice to go on a research bender. I was placed in the capable hands of a disciple of Szulc, Dr. David Manganaro, who had worked with him for years and had taken over the practice.

  Dr. Manganaro would turn out to be terrific, and though I was somewhat disappointed that Szulc had left, the German’s work lived on in Nurse Lisa.

  Nurse Lisa was a big proponent of the Szulc method. “Ally, we are going to give you an IV of saline first,” she told me. “At the same time, we are going to hook you up to a machine by attaching wristbands to you that will calm your nervous system. Have you been taking all of the homeopathics and vitamins we sent to you last week?”

  “Yes, Nurse Lisa,” I said. I felt as if I were answering to a nun. Or a German lieutenant. Both are equally frightening.

  “You don’t have to call me Nurse Lisa. Lisa is just fine. This program only works if you follow it completely. Do you understand?”

  Jaimie and I answered her in unison. “Yes, Nurse Lisa. I mean Lisa.”

  First on the agenda was getting an IV drip of saline to flush out my system and hydrate. In the other arm, Lisa drew blood to be sent through a UV light to be “cleared” and put back into me. My wrists were wrapped with Velcro bracelets that were attached to a machine that sent electromagnetic waves into my body to reset my nervous system, which was completely out of whack. They also checked the vibrations in my blood, which told them the amount of anxiety and confusion running through my body. I know this sounds crazy, but those machines worked. I know they did because they showed exactly how I felt.

  The cleanse protocol was to go on for about one month, depending on how fast my body detoxed. On a scale of 1 (fine) to 20 (unhealthy), my body was a 22, if that existed. I left the office with brown paper bags filled with more bottles of homeopathic drops as well as supplements. The instructions for the meds were very specific and many of the medicines were from Germany. Some were only to be taken without food. With others, I couldn’t use peppermint or spearmint toothpaste or mouthwash, and each dose was to be taken twenty seconds apart from one another. I was to eat an hour before or after taking the remedies. It was all very confusing, and I got hungry just thinking about it.

  At home, Jaimie remained an angel. She lined up all the bottles on the countertop with tiny cups in front of each one. She organized the supplements in separate Tupperware containers according to the times of day they were to be taken. The Virgo in her was shining, and the Pisces in me was twirling. I could have never been this organized on my own. I would’ve tried, but I undoubtedly would’ve gotten confused and overwhelmed and given up.

  Every treatment at Manhattan Advanced Medicine was tailored for my body. I was told that I had to take all of them in the prescribed combination. Taking one of the treatments alone would be unproductive. This is important: Too many Lyme sufferers are using only part of the available arsenal to fight their disease. Just doing vitamins or herbs, or just the IV treatment, or just doing a diet will not cure you. Combining the different treatments to suit your immune system just might.

  It’s something like the premise behind the drug cocktail they came up with to fight HIV back in the late 1990s. Alone, each antiretroviral did little to help patients, but when given together the combination nearly erased what had been a certain death sentence. Lyme disease in the United States is spreading much quicker than AIDS did in the 1980s—the CDC estimates there are at least 300,000 new cases each year—and though death often came quicker for those early AIDS patients, Lyme kills, too. But it kills by inches and minutes, and while it takes its time trying to kill you, it settles for making your life painfully miserable.

  Jaimie stayed with me for four months. Every morning she gently woke me up to take the drops, then let me fall back asleep. Together we would cook a healthy “on diet” breakfast and go to the grocery store. She accompanied me to all the doctor appointments and sat with me through every IV, which took on average about two hours.

  Meanwhile, the treatments progressed. Eventually, after my body was detoxed enough, which took a lot longer than anyone was expecting, I was given IV drips of very high levels of vitamin C, homeopathics, and a special form of hydrogen peroxide. These acted as very strong antimicrobials, as they called them. This was the stuff that would kill the Lyme spirochetes, they promised.

  I imagined each of the IV drips as a soldier in my army. After the drip was over, I went into a little room where the doctor injected me twenty-five times on my abdomen and back with homeopathics. This was my official ring of fire. This was also one of my worst nightmares. I looked at this grueling process as some sort of initiation process—into what, I did not exactly know. Maybe I needed to go through this to become a stronger warrior, woman, and human being. I refused to be victimized by it. Well, I cried a lot the first few times, and then I decided to not become a victim.

  Lying on the table with my shirt up, waiting to be injected twenty-five times in my back and stomach, I began to chant: “Ring of fire, ring of fire, ring of fire.”

  Dr. Shander helped, too. She told me to visualize myself in an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus with priestesses surrounding me, helping me breathe, and chanting healing words.

  “What is your only job right now?” she asked.

  “To heal,” I answered. “My only job right now is to heal my body.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I will remind you every day.”

  And she did.

  It was then, with Shander’s help, that I began to realize that my fight against Lyme had begun to change.

  When I was going through the Manhattan Advanced Medicine treatments, that relapse had left me more debilitated than before. It was painful and difficult to get out of bed to get dressed for the doctor, or to get into a bath. I was so frustrated and depressed that I physically could not function, let alone mentally function. I called Shander to ask her how to handle this. She told me that I needed to learn how to mother MYSELF. Living alone and being sick is hard. Even though Jaimie was with me, I was battling with my inner child and not allowing myself to take care of her properly. There were times in which I literally needed to talk to myself and tell myself “it’s ok, you just need to take a bath, eat something nourishing and lie down to take a nap. I am sorry you are not feeling well, and it’s going to be OKAY.” I would have to touch my sensitive arm sometimes just as a reminder that I was so fragile. It had been so bruised from the many rounds of IV drips, and my muscles were still very sensitive.

  It had been so easy to be discouraged and down on myself at times. I thought I would have to live like this lump of useless human forever. I don’t know how, and I cannot tell you why, but I knew deep down that it wasn’t true. I knew I had more purpose and much to offer the world. I also knew on some level that I had something very important to accomplish.

  It was then I began to step away from being the victim and step toward becoming a healer. A healer for myself. Most real healers have to go through intense physical trials in order to learn how to cure themselves before even thinking about helping others. I’d gone through rings of fire and initiations to begin this last part of my journey, but I knew that I had a long life ahead of me to learn more.

  After four months of going to Manhattan Advanced Medicine, I started to feel better. That July, Jaimie and I went to Europe to meet my dad and Dee and their darling little boy, Sebastian, on a boat in the Mediterranean. We had the time of our lives. After the boat trip, Jaimie and I met my sister Elizabeth in Paris. Elizabeth was taking a summer photography course there. As soon as Jaimie and I got off the plane, I insisted that we celebrate with the most exquisite pastries that Paris had to offer. I had been deprived of sweets for too long, and I’d been living on kale, beet and ginger juice, and carob-covered almonds, which I swear made me gain a few extra pounds. Paris and the Mediterranean Sea made me look and feel glowy and fabulous. I felt more like a human, a lady at that. We shopped until we dropped and became addicted to macaroons.

  When Jaimie and I returned to New York, I got a call from Nary Manivong, who wanted me to help him with his next collection and fashion show. I told him that I was just coming off a four-month intensive Lyme program and still needed to take it slow. He was very respectful and brought the collection to me, as it came out of the factory, and we worked diligently at my apartment. I made us quinoa-kale salads and roasted veggies.

  I received another phone call from Tara Subkoff, a designer friend. She’d started a very popular clothing line years back called Imitation of Christ. It was brilliant. Tara had celebrities of all walks of life modeling for her and wearing her clothes. She held one of her fashion shows at a funeral home on the Lower East Side! When Tara asked if I could help her style her fashion show as well, I agreed. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I respected the brand, and I liked her.

  September rolled around quickly, and by the time Fashion Week came along, I was in full gear again, feeling better than ever. I felt better than I did after any antibiotic treatment. I knew I was on this health wave for the long haul.

  This time, I really believed I was cured of Lyme.

  I looked great; I was clear, calm, happy, inspired beyond belief, and ready to balance my work-health lifestyle. When Tara asked me to partner with her after we had worked on her show, I didn’t have to think twice; we just started a partnership.