It's Always Something (6 page)

We spent the next month in Connecticut and New York doing publicity for
Haunted Honeymoon.
Gene did “Good Morning America.” I did “Late Night with David Letterman.” There were newspaper interviews and press conferences and videotaped talk shows for network affiliates all over the United States. It was exhausting work—anwering the same questions over and over again and trying to make the same answers sound new.

“What’s it like working with your husband as your director?”

“Do you miss doing ‘Saturday Night Live’?”

“What’s next for you?”

At the end of a day, Gene and I were too tired to even talk. As Lorne Michaels, my “Saturday Night Live” producer, used to say, it’s part of why they call it “show business”—not “show fun” or “show art.”

On July 26,
Haunted Honeymoon
opened nationwide. It was a bomb. One month of publicity and the movie was only in the theaters for a week—a box-office disaster.

S
how business is like riding a bicycle—when you fall off, the best thing to do is get up, brush yourself off and get back on again. Gene and I mourned
Haunted Honeymoon
together and apart. He went off to London for a week to see plays and fill his head with new ideas. I kept my New York dance schedule, getting my body into shape for the next show . . . whatever it would be. The rehearsal studio had a hundred mirrors and I could see myself everywhere in the room. I wore a leotard and a black skirt that swirled when I moved and dancing shoes I hadn’t worn since
Gilda Radner Live from New York
was on Broadway, seven years before. You could hear music everywhere in the building. I love the feeling in a rehearsal studio—the creation and anticipation of an opening night.

Somehow my drive, my energy, my adrenaline could rise above what was bothering me physically and mentally. I kept saying to myself, “Take your time, this will go away, you can handle these things.” I was free to dance and express myself in any way I wanted, and Graciela began to build a number with me. My music filled the room and we pretended we had sets and a chorus and an audience. I was a star again, reflected everywhere, and my spirit filled the room.

But throughout the summer the pains in my stomach and bowels continued. I went to see my New York gynecologist. She did an exam and said that it was definitely a stomach problem. She suggested that I see a gastroenterologist. I did, and he agreed that I had a stomach problem. I told him about the vitamins I was taking and he felt the high dosages of vitamin C could be causing the gas. He had me go off all the vitamins that I was taking. He was skeptical of the Epstein-Barr virus diagnosis. He thought that my problems were emotional. He had heard that my recent movie hadn’t done well. It was the return of the Queen of Neurosis. He felt that most stomach problems were the result of stress and anxiety and could be controlled by getting the stress out of your life. In the past my stomach always had been a stress barometer, so I accepted his diagnosis. He wanted to see me in a couple of weeks after I had discontinued the vitamins and kept a chart of all the foods I was eating so he could find out whether I had some food allergies.

But even while I was having all these health problems, I continued to make progress on my own career. I had always dreamed of being a writer. Since I was a little girl, I had written poetry and short stories—my impressions of the world. I kept journals and revered Emily Dickinson in high school. In college, I found my mouth was mightier than my pen and I chose improvisational comedy and writing on my feet out loud in front of an audience. It trained me later for Second City and “Saturday Night Live,” but always inside me was an introspective poet who never was patient enough to write and wait for a response. But I romanticized that writing would be something I could do professionally and still travel anywhere in the world with Gene. I had sent some of my household vignettes to a literary agent. After many rejections from magazines, that same July that
Haunted Honeymoon
bombed,
New Woman
magazine bought some pieces. At the same time
Ms.
magazine was interested in my doing an article. I felt happy, excited that a new career was opening up for me. Now I was going to New York to take my dance classes
and
to see my editors.

Then a new symptom appeared—an aching, gnawing pain in my upper thighs and in my legs. It started slowly, then increased and would not go away. The gynecologist and the gastroenterologist could find no reason for it. My blood work showed nothing wrong. I continued to keep a chart of everything I was eating, and I started to take Tylenol to ease the intense leg pains.

The gastroenterologist decided that I should have a pelvic sonogram to rule out the possibility that any tumor or growth was pressing on a nerve and making my legs ache or causing the bowel disturbance and the gas. The sonogram showed there was some congestion. My ovaries weren’t exactly in the place where they were supposed to be, but that wasn’t serious. There was no sign of tumor, no sign of an obstruction or a mass, and they sent me home, saying, “Everything is fine—there is nothing to worry about.”

I was relieved. I decided I would exercise even more. I walked, I swam, I played tennis and I took lots of Tylenol. I began to notice I was having fewer symptoms of the Epstein-Barr virus—less fatigue. I could go a day without napping. I could exercise without falling apart. The fog didn’t seem to come over me as often. Maybe the illness
was
all in my mind. But the dull ache in my legs continued all day and all night.

In the middle of August the gastroenterologist thought my bowel should be checked with a barium enema. A barium enema is one of the true joyous adventures in life. The patient (me) is only allowed to consume liquids for the preceding twenty-four hours. I was given instructions and packets of pills and liquids to take before going to bed the night before. They made me shit my guts out all night long—I don’t know how else to say it. I was back and forth to the bathroom until I thought I’d turned my insides out. I felt like a pipe after a Drano treatment.

The next morning I was in a radiology office in New York. The technicians strapped me to a table and then put a tube in my rear end. As they poured a chalky liquid inside me and pumped gas into me so that my bowel would show up in a photograph, they were also turning me slowly around and around on the table so that the barium liquid would go all the way through my bowels, making it possible to get pictures at a lot of different angles.

During my days of “Saturday Night Live,” I had been photographed by Scavullo for the cover of
Rolling Stone
and by Richard Avedon for the
Gilda Live
billboard at the Winter Garden Theatre, but I had never had a photo session quite like this. When I was little I would never go on those rides at amusement parks where you were turned upside down, or the one called “the Rotor” where you stand in a cylinder and the cylinder spins and they take the floor out and you are pressed against the wall. I felt like I was trapped on an endless Ferris wheel with someone’s fist up my butt. You can imagine how much I enjoyed the barium enema. I think the word that best captures the whole event is
humiliating
—being photographed spinning with a tube up your ass. All my pictures came out perfect. I had the type of bowel that dipped and turned and had lots of kinks and spinarounds in it, but there were no obstructions, no masses, nothing wrong. Gene and I celebrated with soup and tuna-fish sandwiches on Madison Avenue. At last I had some peace of mind and I could come home happy that I passed that test.

But my leg pains became more intense. Tylenol didn’t help. I couldn’t sleep at night. I couldn’t hold my legs still. I thought I was going crazy. What was wrong with me? The gastroenterologist said he could give me a CAT scan, but he felt it was unnecessary. He suggested I take large doses of anti-inflammatory medication, two pills three or four times a day. It worked, but it caused me to have severe stomach upset—nausea and vomiting. So he prescribed an ulcer medication that stopped the stomach from producing acid. Suddenly I was on two medications just to stop this pain, but all my tests were “normal.” I felt like I was going from being Miss Pristine, who wanted to have a baby and was carefully avoiding drugs and chemicals, to becoming a medicine junkie. I had to face the fact that I wasn’t well enough to try to have a baby. I would have to wait until I got better to try again. I didn’t want to be taking all this medication during pregnancy. Not to mention the fact that chronic pain doesn’t make you feel like having sex. In fact, it became the last thing on my mind.

Still, I continued to travel to New York to dance every week and I noticed as I looked at myself in the mirrors that I was getting thinner. I seemed to be getting thinner than I ought to have been. I wasn’t on a diet. I didn’t feel I was eating less, but my arms were getting very skinny and my face looked drawn and tired. I thought it was probably because I was carrying around pain like a heavy set of luggage. I figured that pain could make you lose weight—trying to keep on going with nagging pain.

Gene spent a lot of time phoning the internist in California, the New York gastroenterologist and the New York gynecologist, and getting prescriptions filled at the pharmacy, hoping the next plan would work and I’d feel well again. He had been offered a movie in Paris. It was a wonderful part for him—shooting was to begin that November. I told him I didn’t feel I could go with him. I wanted to stay in the United States and work on my career. Besides, I felt tied to doctors and was frightened of going to Europe and not being in good health. Again, the stress factors were splitting me different ways—the marriage, the baby, the career—but I didn’t feel well enough to command the situation. The best Gene and I could do was arrange a schedule so we’d be apart as little as possible.

Being a celebrity can do strange things to the medical attention you get. In some ways it can be very helpful. Sometimes you can get an appointment faster than someone else or get a hospital room or maybe a private nurse. Certainly if you have money, you can afford to get more medical attention or a more acclaimed doctor. But the downside of celebrity is that oftentimes you
don’t
get the kind of attention that someone who is not a celebrity would get. On one of my doctor visits I took Gene with me, and I saw the doctor get terribly nervous when Gene talked to him. I’m sure he was thinking,
There’s the guy from
Young Frankenstein!
There’s the guy from
Stir Crazy! He was unable to listen to my symptoms or to really hear what was going on. I have gone to doctors by myself and seen that they are looking at Roseanne Roseannadanna or Emily Litella, and not seeing the person who is sick, who has complaints. They wait, expecting me to be funny. As my symptoms increased, I became less and less funny, more serious, more determined to discover what was wrong with me. I couldn’t quit—I knew there was something wrong, and I wasn’t going to stop looking for what it was. I knew I may have been neurotic, but I also knew that what was happening to me was real.

On September 15, I took a train by myself from Connecticut to Boston to see a doctor who had treated over three hundred Epstein-Barr virus patients. When I had spoken to him on the phone to arrange the appointment, he had encouraged me, saying every symptom, even the leg pains I mentioned, he had heard from other Epstein-Barr virus patients. He wanted me to come and see him for an examination. I spent the night in Boston and went to the appointment early in the morning.

He was a lovely man—truly kind, and the first of all the doctors I had seen who really looked into my eyes, who listened to all my complaints. He said he understood; he had heard them before. He was sure this was Epstein-Barr virus. He told me that there was no cure, but that everything I was complaining of was quite normal and I really wasn’t in as bad a state as many patients he was seeing. That was encouraging. He wanted me to give a blood sample that they could keep there for experimental research projects. He thought if the medications I was on helped the symptoms, then that was good. He also recommended that I take low dosages of an antidepressant called Elavil. That would help with any sleeping disorder, and a proper night’s sleep would help my symptoms, but I would see no effect from the Elavil until I had taken it for two weeks. At this point, I was willing to try anything.

I kept looking searchingly in his eyes for some answer to this, some cure,
something.
I told him I was afraid.

“What is it specifically that you are afraid of?” he asked.

“I am afraid that it is cancer.” I had read articles that linked Epstein-Barr virus to blood and lymphatic cancers.

He said, “The best thing you can do is to continue to have your blood work done and continue to stay in contact with a physican so that you set your mind at ease.”

When I left his office, I stopped in the lab to give my blood. The technician came out, wrapped the rubber strap around my arm, took my blood, hurriedly took the card that I had filled out and went back to her seat in the laboratory. She had never even looked at me. On my way out, I stopped just around the corner to go to the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet, I realized that I was in the bathroom where you give urine samples, and there was a little box on a door that went directly into the lab. Through that little door, I could hear the technician yelling at the top of her lungs in the lab, “Oh my God, that was Gilda Radner. I can’t believe that she came in here. I didn’t say hello. I didn’t even look at her. God, this is her blood! I can’t believe it.”

I just sat there with a smile on my face, thinking, “I hope she doesn’t drop it on the floor.”

On September 22, I saw my internist in California. My blood work was normal. He suggested I see a new gynecologist, so a week later I saw a California gynecologist. He did a pelvic exam. He felt some scar tissue but everything else appeared normal. He said I could continue trying to have a baby. But I was tired, in pain and running low-grade fevers. I was on too much medication. I decided to see an acupuncturist because friends had begun to suggest alternatives to my medical care. I had never had acupuncture—but I didn’t care at this point what I tried. The acupuncturist was a woman. She listened to my medical history and my symptoms patiently. Then she took me into a quiet room and had me lie down on a table. She proceeded to put needles in different places, behind my ears, in my feet and ankes. She was so soothing and healing and patient with me that I loved being there. For a few minutes, lying on that table, I could actually transcend my pain and discomfort because I felt someone cared and I was getting some attention. I became hopeful that this might work. At the same time, when she would leave me alone in the room with all the needles in me, I would think,
What is a Jew doing lying on a table like a chicken about to be basted and put in the oven?