Health

In February 2003, Jill Wiechert—34-years-old with a full head of hair and carrying a three-week-old baby girl—showed up at Johns Hopkins Hospital for her first round of chemotherapy. It was a scenario she could have hardly imagined in May 2002, when she got married and found herself getting pregnant on her honeymoon.

Six months later she found a lump in her breast and called her obstetrician, who sent Wiechert for a sonogram. “From there I went to a surgeon, who believed there was a 90 percent chance that this was just a cyst, and I had a biopsy,” says Wiechert. “Two days later my husband and I were listening to people recommend that I have both breasts removed.

He’s made a career of giving hope to people who have very little: those individuals awaiting transplants, particularly kidney transplants, and those who have been deemed “untransplantable” and, therefore, have been largely ignored by the medical establishment.

But in the summer of 2003, Dr. Robert Montgomery made medical history when he headed a team of physicians and nurses who performed the first “triple swap” kidney transplants in the United States. The headline-grabbing surgery saw doctors matching up patients so that all the incompatible donor-recipient pairs ended up getting transplants.

Tom Penna, a 25-year-old bank teller in Frederick, was ecstatic when his banking job finally allowed him to have adequate health insurance. With a host of allergies and a warning from an allergist that his childhood bouts of asthma were likely to return, he was finally able to embark upon a treatment plan of prescription drugs and weekly shots.

But with rising health costs, his employer was forced to switch insurance plans and to slash its subsidy of the plans as well.

“The result was that my premiums, as well as my co-pay if I were to get the weekly shots, would cost me much more,” says Penna.

Newly married, with a wife in graduate school, Penna was forced to drop treatment for his asthma. “We just couldn't afford it. I guess we'll re-evaluate things when my wife is out of graduate school.”

Tomiko Fraser and her younger sister, Shneequa, can still communicate, although it is often a struggle. Shneequa, who was diagnosed with lupus seven years ago, has suffered brain damage and can't always come up with the right words.

“My sister has a special language that she uses,” says Tomiko. “For instance, for some reason she refers to the color ‘black’ as the number ‘10’ and ‘green’ is the number ‘4.’”

Understanding the code words, combined with hand gestures, makes it possible for the sisters to stay close and share each other's thoughts and feelings.

As a model for Maybelline, an actress, and a spokesperson for the Lupus Foundation of America, Tomiko is surrounded by the glamour that accompanies today’s top models. But, as Shneequa’s guardian and primary caregiver, Tomiko often has to make the glamorous life less of a priority.

All too often, caregivers are so overwhelmed by the demands of a child with schizophrenia that they overlook the needs of their other children, the so-called “well” siblings. But mental illness affects everyone in the family and parents need to take care not to neglect the needs of their well children.

In her Book, “Troubled Journey: Coming to Terms with the Mental Illness of a Sibling or Parent,” University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg psychology professor Diane Mash writes, “The sense of being forgotten family members reverberates through the personal accounts of siblings. When their sister developed mental illness, a sibling wrote that ‘my brother and I felt there was no time for us; everyone was consumed by what was going on with my sister. We no longer mattered.’”