story of a friendship...part 4

Meanwhile, out west, Anne had her own problems...

After her surgery in the spring of 2012 (only a few weeks before I had mine--we do such things by the buddy system...) she sounded so much better on the phone, and told me how much better she felt.  But the relief was short-lived.  It wasn’t long--less than six months, I believe--till she began to develop terrific headaches accompanied by neurological symptoms such as vision changes, weakness, difficulty walking...not good stuff. 

I waited anxiously to hear what was wrong.  It took a lot of time and testing.  When a definitive diagnosis was finally reached, she was very reluctant to tell me.  But I wanted to know the name of this monster that had been stalking my best friend for so long. 
One disadvantage of getting to know someone over the phone and through emails is that some pieces of the puzzle come together slowly.  It took awhile for it to compute in my brain that the spinal curvature, the surgeries, the constant pain, and the bleeding problems that she endured were all connected.  The pieces finally fit, but my heart sank lower and lower as I read the information about vascular type Ehler’s Danlos Syndrome (EDS).  EDS is a complicated hereditary disorder that weakens the body’s connective tissue.  It takes various forms; some are more serious than others.  Of all of them, the vascular type is the most serious--the one with the shortest life expectancy, due to the weakening of blood vessels that make a person prone to spontaneous rupture of vessels and bleeding out via aneurysm or with any kind of trauma, even minor trauma.  I looked up various sources but they all said pretty much the same thing.  One statistic that burned its way into my brain was that, by age 40, 80% of individuals with vascular type EDS develop life-threatening complications.  I read as much as I could find--I had to know.  At least it had a name.  All I could think was...”she’s almost 36...and it‘s starting.”  Her last surgery almost killed her.  But without it, she‘d probably have been gone already... 

I began to wonder if maybe we would never meet here on earth...maybe God wanted it that way.  We had carelessly thrown around phrases like “when I come out west,” or “when I come east...”  and “if I were five minutes closer, I’d be right over.”  But now such talk made my throat and chest feel tight.  I had that blessed assurance that if I never got to see her here on earth, we would meet someday.  But oh, how I wanted to meet here, in this world...