marfan

visit the National Marfan Foundation Web site.

It’s pretty weird to find out one day, just about a month after your 21st birthday, that you have a genetic disorder that could kill you before you turn 40. That’s what happened to me, and here is my story so far . . .

I was born with some of the classic indicators of Marfan Syndrome, but in the mid to late ’70s they didn’t have all of the fancy medical diagnostic equipment that we have today and my symptoms are really pretty mild compared to what they could be. No one really gave it too much thought for 20 years, so I have dislocated lens and some longer than average limbs-that couldn’t be a ‘syndrome’ could it?

When I was 20, my vision became markedly worse, the shape of my eye was changing radically and the doctors couldn’t figure out why, so like doctors do, they sent me to some specialists. And like specialists do, they ran a whole bunch of tests to rule out things like bubonic plague, martian venereal diseases and chronic halitosis. Along the way, they revisited the idea of Marfan syndrome, I know that they must have been grasping at straws because that means someone actually read my chart all the way back to the first couple of years of my life-you don’t get that kind of treatment unless you are a medical marvel or something. Well I guess I am.

After much hemming and hawing, they sent me to a cardiologist, who ordered up thousands of dollars in EKG, echocardiograms blah blah blah and then when he thought he saw something, he sent me right to the man Dr Reed Pyeritz. This guy is possibly the world’s foremost clinician and physician in regard to Marfan Syndrome, and even he wasn’t sure I had Marfan Syndrome. But in the end he couldn’t do anything else but drop the bomb, there were just too many coincidences.

So there I sat, I had the answer to my many small chronic ailments: eye problems, joint pain, slow healing of cuts and bruises, weird stretch marks on my shoulders, all that goofy shit. And I also gained the knowledge that at any time my aorta cut burst open and I could die in minutes.

Talk about a bummer!

Dr. Reed put me on beta-blocker drugs to keep my heart in check and he told me and told me and told me that I have to drop some weight (like 50 pounds) and that I shouldn’t ever consider myself a candidate for contact sports or marathons (like that would ever happen) and sent me on my way. That was four years ago, I went back to see him once about a year after my initial diagnosis and he told me all of the same things, especially since I stopped taking the drugs and didn’t lose the weight and continued to play rough-house sports at school.

Today I am living in denial, I can admit it but that doesn’t mean I am going to do anything about it. I guess that if I forget about it, my life can seem normal. I don’t want to live with a ‘syndrome’. I don’t want to think about the 50% chance that my children will inherit my genetic mutation. I especially don’t want to think about my children getting a severe form of Marfan syndrome and being physically malformed and doomed to an early death.

But it doesn’t go away. And I can’t escape probability. And I can’t accept any of it, damn it.

Is it wrong to be angry? Is it wrong to want to wish my misfortune on someone else, a nameless stranger I will never meet perhaps? Is it wrong to play this down with my wife , family an friends?

The short answers would be: No, no, and yes.

Looks like it is time to put my hands in the water and start to paddle, because I have certainly put myself up the creek without an oar.

Don’t be like me, if you’ve got a problem: attack it head on. That’s what I am going to start to do, and I’ll keep you up to date as it happens.

1 thought on “marfan

  1. Hey there. I’m a late 20-something with marfans, too. I came across your blog when I was researching Marfan stuff. I’ve been diagnosed since I was five when my eye doctor caught it. I’ve met other people with Marfan and I feel pretty lucky that my problems are relatively mild.

    If you’re going to give up on the beta-blockers and weight loss, I can’t stress enough that you should still see the cardiologist for an echo AT LEAST every two years and preferably every year. Seriously. My understanding is that the chances of your aorta randomly bursting really aren’t much greater than anyone else’s unless it starts enlarging or you suffer some a serious trauma. That’s why it’s important to monitor it with the echo. The meds also help prevent it from enlarging in the first place. I was on the beta-blockers for a bit, but they exacerbated my migraines. Now I’m on Losartin.

    Anyhoo, take care of yourself!

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