This determination and strength would carry me through some of my darkest times with Lyme disease. I had no idea that the power of my mind would conquer the uphill battles I was going to face in my future.

  seven

  THE GREEN LOLLIPOP EXCUSE

  “Once inside the central nervous system, the organism (spirochete) can wreak all kinds of havoc, from memory problems, moodiness and depression to hallucinations, panic attacks, paranoia, manic depression, seizures and even dementia. Memory problems are the most common sign of a brain infection.”

  —NEW YORK TIMES

  After I began to recover and returned home, I started rehearsals for Abby’s Song. They were held in a space in the far west reaches of the Theater District in Manhattan, way off Broadway. Each day our driver would pick me up at home in Connecticut and take me into the city. At the time, I was feeling a lot of pain in my joints, especially my knees. I would sit in rehearsal on one of those taupe folding chairs with my jacket wrapped around my legs because they were so sensitive to the cold hard metal.

  I had to use a cane at times because of the snowboarding accident, but luckily my mother had a fabulous collection of antique wooden canes with intricate handles. Truth be told, though, despite my pain and uncertain health I was happy to be out of my house and acting. I put everything I had into learning the lines and the role. I lived on protein shakes and peanut butter PowerBars in fear that I would have another embarrassing low blood sugar attack and have to stop the play. (The cause of these attacks still confuses me. I do know that other Lyme sufferers experience them.)

  All of the cast’s hard work paid off. We were an instant hit, first for a short run as a workshop production, and then for an off-Broadway run at City Center, a very respected venue with 1,200 seats. Paul Sorvino was in the cast and Randy Skinner, a well-known Broadway talent, was the director. The role I played was Lilly, the granddaughter of the innkeepers who turned Mary and Joseph away and the lead role’s best friend. It wasn’t the biggest part, but I hit one line every night that got the biggest laugh. I don’t remember the line exactly but I do remember I channeled my inner Lucille Ball to deliver it.

  One of the best memories of the show was when just about the whole Eagle Hill School came to a performance. My worst memory was dropping a line one night in front of a full house. I stood on stage frozen under the hot lights. There was a very scary moment but then a calm came over me. I remembered what they told me to do if this happened: I stayed in character and ad-libbed until the line came back to me.

  Those days and nights of Abby’s Song were really fun. Jackie Angelescu played the title role and Jackie and I became great friends. But there was trouble in the wings: In spite of the Scotland trip, my parents’ relationship was on the rocks. There was a lot of tension in the air. I felt as if I was being forced to take a side, and my relationship with my mom was especially strained. Each night on the stage, however, I was free from all of the games, self-centeredness, and turmoil at home. Even though my knees hurt all the time and I often nearly passed out from feeling weak, I danced and sang my heart out.

  I found out in Mustique that my parents were separating. My mother and I took a long weekend vacation there because I needed to get some rest and sunshine. I didn’t have to be psychic to know something was going on: My father was constantly traveling and staying in Manhattan during the week. Still, Mom was shocked, I think, when I confronted her on the island, but also a little relieved. In a weird way, I was relieved, too.

  Ignoring the secret had been stressful and awkward. Besides, most of my friends’ parents were divorced so in one way it made me feel somewhat normal. Still, there was a time when the idea of my mom and dad not being together was unimaginable to me. They were nearly childhood sweethearts, for God’s sake! They’d built a fabulous life and a family together as partners. They’d truly been in love. Though I might have been relieved that the secret was out, the news still left me in a state of sadness so deep I was numb. Mom made me promise not to tell my siblings, or anyone else for that matter, which was her usual method of dealing with anything: If you don’t talk about it, it’s not real.

  In 2000, my father moved into the Trump International Hotel and Tower on Central Park West. I decided to move in with him so I could attend the Professional Children’s School (PCS), a high school on West Sixtieth Street for the performing arts, a school for kids who were working mostly in the entertainment industry. Most of the students were in theater, the School of American Ballet, or the Juilliard School. It was not at all unusual to see someone playing the violin or dancing ballet in the hallway.

  Moving in with my dad didn’t exactly go smoothly. When I walked into the apartment for the first time I locked myself in the bathroom and couldn’t stop crying. Richard and Elizabeth came with us to sleep our first night in the new apartment because it sounded like a fun, exciting adventure. But I stayed in the bathroom for a couple of hours and wouldn’t let my dad in. I was traumatized at the notion that our family life had changed so dramatically, and that I was no longer going to live in the home my mother made for us. I was deeply saddened by the fact that my parents were no longer together, and that there was so much change in my life. I just wanted to go home, and Dad drove me back to Connecticut. I would move back in with him a couple of days later.

  It was around this time that I started to experience acute anxiety and panic attacks. I didn’t know, of course, that Lyme disease can invade the nervous system and produce mood swings, panic, obsessive behavior, sudden rages, depression, and other psychiatric symptoms. But I think it was also completely normal for the eldest of four children with separating parents to go through a rough bout with anxiety.

  One day it really hit me. Chef Lynn Pasquale worked for my parents and watched over me while I was living in Manhattan and going to PCS when Dad was traveling for business. She had long, gleaming brown hair, and dressed very crunchy granola, complete with Birkenstocks. She was a ball of light and glowy happiness. Lynn and I became very close. We’d watch Sex in the City religiously, lip-synch and dance to Britney Spears songs, and giggle together all the time.

  One day I was rehearsing for a play in school and felt particularly anxious. I chalked it up to everything that was going on with my parents, a blood sugar dip, and a cold I was battling. But on the short walk home I started to feel as though I was shaking apart. I remember standing on the corner of Sixtieth and Broadway thinking I wouldn’t make it across the street without being hit by a cab or a truck. By the time I got into the elevator in my building I could hear my heart pumping, or at least I thought I could.

  Inside the apartment door, the sight of me shocked Lynn. “Oh my God,” she said, “you’re white as a sheet!”

  The last thing I remember is gulping for breath and collapsing into her arms. Lynn called 911, and when the EMTs arrived they took my blood pressure and said that if she hadn’t called them, I might very well have had a heart attack and died. I don’t think the guy was exaggerating, but it seemed a little extreme and scary. When they wheeled me out of the apartment on a gurney and through the marble gilded lobby of the gaudy Trump Tower, I was inclined to flip over and just hide my face. I was frustrated with my body for reacting so dramatically; I had no control over anything.

  The doctor in the emergency room told me it was an anxiety attack. I was shocked. I didn’t know anxiety could nearly kill you, and I certainly didn’t know yet that Lyme disease could cause anxiety. These attacks would follow me throughout the next few years. I was prescribed Klonopin for a while by a fancy Upper East Side psychiatrist. After taking Klonopin on a daily basis as prescribed, I became a sloppy, sweaty, loopy mess. After a few blackout nights on that stuff, I tossed the pills and never went back to that doctor. I later learned that left unchecked, Lyme disease can cause permanent damage to the heart and even death by heart attack.7

  I mostly liked going to PCS and made many friends there. I also started to do better in some classes, maybe because they weren’t feeding me the traditional reading, writing, and arithmetic that Sacred Heart served up. Ms. Sclan, the hippy English teacher who dressed like Miss Frizzle from The Magic School Bus, and Mr. Hart, the gay motorcycle-riding history teacher, were my favorites. They both respected me as a person as well as a student. Ms. Sclan assigned books like James McBride’s The Color of Water and some of Shakespeare’s most obscure pieces of work. Sclan also integrated film with poetry and literature. We watched Woody Allen movies and romantic comedies.

  My teachers didn’t realize that it was a miracle I could read and understand the books at all. All the work I’d put into reading, the remedial classes, the tutoring, and just trying hard on my own, had paid off. The same, however, could not be said for my math skills.

  At PCS I was placed in the regular math class but it quickly became apparent that I was not at all equipped for what they were teaching. So I was switched to what was lovingly referred to as “the idiot’s math class.” Mrs. Moloff taught the class. At five foot one, dressed always in black, and with dark circles under her eyes, Mrs. Moloff was an insomniac who called an 800 number to help her sleep. For some reason, she was also obsessed with penguins. She had penguin posters, penguin pens, stuffed penguins, and penguin curtains. She was very shy and talked in a whisper. The class was so remedial I’m embarrassed to tell you about it. In high school I was doing multiplication tables. That’s all I could understand! I just couldn’t retain anything. They were trying to prepare me for algebra and calculus. I had as much chance of doing calculus as I had of building a Mars Rover.

  My time at PCS marks one of the low points in my relationship with my mom. We hardly talked and since I was in New York and she was in Connecticut, we didn’t see each other often—which was probably a good thing. I was mad because I believed my mother had left my dad, and because Mom had begun to tell me that I was overly dramatic when I complained about my ailments. I was annoyed because she always seemed to be too involved in her own life to pay enough attention to mine.

  In her defense, she did have a lot going on. She ran Best & Company then, which sold luxury children’s clothing in two stores, one in Greenwich and one in Bergdorf Goodman. She also had my two younger sisters and my brother to take care of, which consumed her. And she was going though a very emotional separation from a soul mate of more than twenty years. Those demands would have challenged anyone.

  During this time, to help us bond my mom thought we should take a private acting class together. Maybe then she could better relate to me, the dramatic one. My drama teacher agreed to meet with us after class one day but, of course, I didn’t show up. I showed very little respect to my mother at this time, but I did let the teacher know I wasn’t going to come. You would think my mother would just then go home, but of course, she didn’t. I can’t imagine what my teacher must have been thinking, left alone with this woman he didn’t even know in his classroom. I guess he figured he should make the best of the situation so he had my mother read a speech from a play. Mom put everything she had into it and the teacher told her she had a lot of potential. To this day my mother holds on to that moment as if she’d won a Tony. She makes me tell the story to strangers when we’re in stores waiting on line. Every time she does I roll my eyes.

  Maybe I was dramatic in some ways, but much of the drama I expressed came from years of frustration. In high school my health was deteriorating faster than any treatment could help me. My parents took me to famous sports doctors who treated me for arthritis. At one point my father and I flew to Boston to meet a doctor affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He concluded from my blood work that I might have Lyme disease, but the tests were inconclusive. He told us the blood levels were just borderline positive. “It could be multiple sclerosis,” the doctor said, which we’d heard before. Because of the symptoms I was reporting, from blurred vision to joint pain and muscle weakness, it was no wonder he suspected MS. When the doctor said it, my father’s heart sank; his sister Susie battled MS her whole life and was bound to a wheelchair.

  “But it is probably fibromyalgia,” the doctor continued, “a disorder that is the most common musculoskeletal condition after osteoarthritis.”

  Somewhat relieved by the fact that 1) it most likely was not in fact MS and 2) I might actually be able to have a proper diagnosis and hopefully a solid treatment, off we went to a fibromyalgia specialist. I thought I had found the answer! We walked into a Park Avenue office and I was dressed like, well, someone not from Park Avenue. I had met my friends after school in Sheep Meadow, in Central Park, to smoke a joint. As I made my way to the office to meet my parents, I wondered if the doctor would be able to tell if I was stoned. I assumed that I wouldn’t be the only one of his patients who self-medicated to ease pain.

  “Why is your tongue green?” he asked when he examined me.

  I guess I could have been honest and told him I’d just smoked some weed but instead I came up with a quick and stupid answer: “I had a green apple lollipop before I got here.”

  Maybe the excuse worked, or maybe it didn’t, but he didn’t say anything.

  I left the office with medication to help alleviate the fibromyalgia symptoms. Anti-inflammatories, I think. They barely worked. Some days I felt okay and on others I knew something was not right, but I hung on to the diagnosis because it was the only one that made much sense. Fibromyalgia actually included all of the strange symptoms I had been feeling. Plus, the diagnosis from a fancy doctor convinced my parents that I was actually experiencing the pain I’d been describing. Not that they thought I was making it all up; I just never felt they believed me all of the time.

  In my mind I was halfway to real relief. Now all someone had to do was tell me what was really wrong with me.

  eight

  PAINTING, CHANTING, AND PITCHING FILMS TO FAMOUS ACTORS

  “All that you need is in your soul.”

  —LYNYRD SKYNYRD, “SIMPLE MAN”

  It was in high school when a spiritual channel that I believe ultimately saved my life from Lyme disease began to open. Please know that I’m not saying this lightly. In my heart, I know I’d be dead if not for some of my spiritual beliefs. Lynn introduced me to a healer she used and I had phone sessions with her every week for a couple of months. She could not identify the disease that was growing in my body, but she suggested many detoxifying treatments such as salt baths to help with the symptoms I explained to her. She recommended meditation and vocal chanting. She knew my vessel was becoming thinner and thinner, I am sure. She knew I needed to do things to physically strengthen this vessel, but I was not disciplined or motivated enough to follow many of her suggestions. One suggestion I did follow, however, was tapping my third eye twenty-one times to relieve my anxiety. This actually worked well for me.

  I had my first spiritual experience years before on Mustique, and I had always felt a spiritual connection to others. In high school, though, that connection matured to adulthood, so to speak.

  At the time, I had a boyfriend named Garrett. We kept diaries together and wrote pages and pages about our enduring love, which lasted only about a year. He was a senior, I was a sophomore, and I went to the prom with him. Around this time, as I mentioned in the last chapter, I had been smoking pot pretty frequently. Along with liking the high like any other red-blooded American teenager, I found that pot helped with the pain in my joints and the nausea I was beginning to experience. The benefit of it outweighed the risk, I thought. In hindsight, I should have taken the healer’s recommendations to help with the growing symptoms.

  By then I already had a bad memory and was in a fog just about all the time. What’s the difference? I thought. Besides, using pot was fun, and I was less angry and frustrated when I smoked it. With my friends, I would sneak off to Sheep Meadow in Central Park or to the park at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus, which was across the street from my high school. There I would find relief and escape.

  I knew that I could stop smoking pot anytime I wanted. At that time I’d become friends with a girl who didn’t smoke pot or drink at all. When I began to hang around her I stopped drinking and smoking pot and instead turned my attention to a variety of spiritual disciplines: I read Buddhist teachings, attended chanting classes, and tried to stop smoking cigarettes (“tried” being the operative word).

  The night of the prom, or in the wee hours of the morning after it, shall we say, Garrett wanted to go to a club on the West Side Highway, and I didn’t feel like hanging with a bunch of people getting wasted. So I walked home to my dad’s apartment on Central Park West in my prom dress. At some point, I took off my shoes. I don’t know whether it was my bare feet on the sidewalk or something else, but I had an electric connection to my surrounding that was maybe the most intense feeling I’ve ever felt. It was as though I had pure clarity and an awareness about myself and the world. I felt calm and centered. Happy.

  Lynn was there when I got home. At the time, Lynn’s cat was dying, and Lynn was distraught. I was able to put the event in a universal perspective that eased Lynn’s pain. Even though I cannot recall the exact words I provided, I told her that her cat had probably offered her things in life that no human could provide. I told her that souls recycle and that dying doesn’t necessarily mean the end, or never again. Death is just a transformation of the soul, a transition, and a part of life as an eternal continuous circle. In that moment, I could see how much I believed in fate, destiny, past lives, karma, and the fact that we all come to earth to learn lessons from each other. Even the souls of animals can teach us so much. I realized, too, that the insight I was able to offer Lynn could also help me on my own path through life.