I’d suffered from symptoms that would come and go ever since childhood. Fevers, urinary tract infections, nerve pain and numbness, depression. Symptoms I tried to dull with alcohol, but the effect was temporary. Symptoms that only grew stronger over time.
Right around the time I met Jason Bleick [father of Selma’s son, Arthur, in 2010], I began to lose feeling in my legs in a way I never had before. They started to give up, inexplicably. I’d been riding again, which I loved. One day, I was walking down a hill with my horse, when out of nowhere I fell. The ground just slipped from under me.
I wasn’t binge drinking then. In fact, I felt I was in a good place: Jason and I were happy, I was active, I had work. I decided, since I wasn’t drinking, it must be diet related. I hired a chef to make macrobiotic, mostly vegetarian meals, inspired by Alicia Silverstone’s The Kind Life. I ate tempura and fish in special sauces, made pots of green soups. I went to chiropractors, energy workers, every kind of healer. (What’s ironic to me now is that I spent so much of my life consulting experts, looking for signs, when all along there were the signs right in front of me.)
Then I got shingles. Intense nerve pain, unlike anything I’d ever experienced, shot up and down my leg, up into my hips. The shingles cleared up thanks to antivirals and rest, but I still felt unwell. My leg still gave out. Doctors told me it was postherpetic neuralgia – the body’s memory of the shingles virus.
This continued, off and on, for several years. Some episodes were petrifying. When Arthur was about
