When I was in my early 40's, I was probably in the best shape of my life. I worked full time as a telephone operator at the Sharon Hospital and enjoyed 4 weeks of paid vacation time a year. We traveled whenever there was a chance. Life was good.

The slide started with a New Year's Eve party we attended in 1973. Someone had mono and I brought it home with me. Ended up in the hospital quite sick with some liver involvement. Just felt worn out and had dizziness and the stomach pain. My doc ordered a stim test after countless bags of saline went down the drain. I didn't understand what the test was for, but remember a feeling of well being after the injection was given. Unfortunately, the test had to be sent out to another lab, where it was not read properly - they called it normal. My blood pressure was 50/40 the day I was to be discharged, but instead my doc ordered a shot that knocked me into the next day. I had no appetite, but one of the dieticians came to see me and asked me to try the equivalent of a lime smoothie, and it was the first thing that really tasted good.

I did get well enough to go home and planned a trip to visit mother and some of Arch's family in Florida. The fresh sweet corn in February was especially good, as was the orange juice. Anything salty was great too! I had dropped 40# and was an ugly shade of wet cement tinged with yellow. The trip was just what the doctor ordered. I regained strength enough to work on a part time basis.

In late July, my PC sent me to a colleague of his who was Chief of Internal Medicine and Endocrinology at the Cleveland Clinic, a teaching school. After a battery of tests, he and his resident sat down with me and explained Addison's. They told me I was a primary Addisonian, and proceeded to give me a shot of cortisone in each hip and within 10 minutes I went from half dead to alive, alert and talking a blue streak. I was a "victim" of Grand Rounds at the Cleveland Clinic the day before Sandy was married the first time...the doc told me he might need to do a liver biopsy to get me there for the occasion.

I failed to mention that Arch had a heart attack on June 4th, 1974 while flying our Aeronca Champ over a friends landing strip about 15 miles from home - the champ was a tandom seater, so I had no clue what was happening from the back seat. It was also about the noisiest contraption that flew, so he couldn't tell me. He got down as low as safety would allow and followed I-80 home - I was happy as a clam and had no clue until he made a perfect landing, crawled out of the plane and laid on the tarmac. I was undiagnosed at the time, but could tell by his color he was having a heart attack, and I don't remember how I did it, but I drove him to the hospital.

As an after thought, my father's sister was diagnosed with adrenal insufficiency long before they had treatment for Addison's...it can be familial.