DISABILITIES

By Daniel J. Vance

Weeks ago, I received an email from a reader in The Desert Advocate near Phoenix. While interviewing her over the telephone, I learned we both had lived only houses away from each other in the same Maryland neighborhood yet at different times. Meet Fangette (pronounced Fan Jet) Willett, 69.

“I'm a songwriter,” she said. “I used to be an independent writer for Columbia and RCA Victor. I wrote for Lou Rawls, Barbara McNair, and Walter Jackson, who recorded my “It's An Uphill Climb (To the Bottom).”

Her disabilities are post-polio syndrome and fibromyalgia.

“There was no cure for polio in my day,” she said. “Doctors then normally put you in braces. But my father was a doctor practicing with Sister Kenny, who said to put heat on the affected area. My whole family had a hand in continually wrapping my left leg. To this day you can't tell I have polio.”

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, post-polio syndrome is a “condition that affects polio survivors anywhere from 10-40 years after recovery” from an initial polio paralytic attack. It involves further muscle weakening. The U.S. has about 300,000 polio survivors.

Her post-polio syndrome began about 1990. Not long afterwards she began showing fibromyalgia symptoms, too. The National Fibromyalgia Association defines it as a “chronic pain illness characterized by widespread musculoskeletal aches, pain and stiffness, soft tissue tenderness, general fatigue and sleep disturbances.”

In 1991, fibromyalgia pain began hitting her like a “20-foot wave.” Her physician, who believed her pain was “all in her head,” tried referring her to a psychiatrist.

“That was humiliating,” she said. “It took nine years and about 50 doctors before a Georgetown University doctor diagnosed me with fibromyalgia. In those nine years I was frantic. How could all those doctors not know what was happening to me?”

Finally, her doctor recommended a warmer, dryer climate. Maryland had wet winters. So she and her husband moved to Arizona, began changing their entire lifestyle, and in ten days she was out of her wheelchair and walking.

As for symptoms, “when it's humid, everything hurts yet,” she said. “But when it's not humid I feel 100 percent.”

She also credits her recovery to the following: a supportive husband, vitamin and mineral supplements, prayer, blood tests, self-determination, the book Recovering from Chronic Fatigue, and stress reduction.

For more, see www.danieljvance.com