© The Denver Post, 9/6/98, ©1998

Illness Disables Gulf War Veteran

Nightmare disease defies search for permanent cure
 
The Denver Post;  September 6, 1998

By Loretta Sword
The Associated Press 

PUEBLO—Tricia Parvis remembers watching SCUD missiles explode in the black skies above the deserts of Bahrain in 1991.

“It was like watching fireworks,” she said, adding that she never gave a thought to the questions that trouble her daily now.

Did chemical or bacterial weapons somehow find their way into her system?  Did her commanders knowingly withhold information?

Could she somehow have protected herself from the debilitating illnesses and symptoms she has experienced since returning from the Gulf War?

“I never got into my full chemical suit because it wasn’t required,” explained the soft-spoken 28-year-old.  “They never told us to.”

After several months as a field medic with the Marines, the Navy reservist volunteered to stay behind as part of the “cleanup crew” after the war ended.

She shipped home to Colorado Springs late in April.

By summertime, she began experiencing symptoms that she, her doctor and family members in Pueblo wrote off a minor thyroid problems, “and just adjusting to normal life again.”

She resumed work in a laboratory at Memorial Hospital, met a man who won her heart and married him.  A son, Nick, was born.

Symptoms Multiply

And Tricia’s troubling symptoms worsened and grew in number.

She was irritable and nervous.  Always a little on the hefty side from years as a swimmer, she was losing weight.

Her parents, Synadi and Nick Biernacki of Pueblo, “wrote it all off to being still fairly newly wed and being a new mom,” Biernacki remembers.

But soon her health was so poor that she was forced to move in with her parents.  Her husband stayed behind in Colorado Springs.

And Tricia’s odyssey—from doctor to doctor, searching for answers to an ever-growing list of symptoms—began in earnest.

In July 1995, pregnant with her second son, she began experiencing severe abdominal pains, extreme fatigue often accompanied by fever, and other symptoms that she knew weren’t related to her pregnancy.

“I was dropping about 6 pounds a week.  I couldn’t even keep clear liquids down,” she said.

In September, her obstetrician inserted a semipermanent valve so Tricia could get continuous intravenous nutrition for herself and her baby.

She continued working at the hospital to maintain her health insurance.

After fainting in the bathroom one day, she implored her obstetrician to look further into her health.

“I kept telling the doctor that something was really, really wrong with me,” Tricia said.   “For God’s sake, I was throwing up green and black bile.”

Diagnosis: depression

The doctors initial diagnosis was depression, Biernacki said.

“In other words, she thought it was in Tricia’s mind.  I told this doctor, “Of course she’s depressed.  She’s pregnant, she has a toddler and she carrying a food bag around with her because she can’t eat anything by mouth.”

The doctor later suggested a partial-birth abortion.  He feared the baby would either be deformed or drug-addicted because of the many medications Purvis was taking to control pain and other symptoms.  

“That just wasn’t an option I would consider,” Purvis said.

Finally, he suggested removal of her gall bladder, and she had the surgery.

“She seemed to be rebounding quite well, except  she was tired and in a lot of pain” after the surgery, Biernacki said.

By the time her son was born, Purvis’ weight had dropped to 110 pounds, a loss of 60 pounds during the pregnancy.  But she was the proud mother of a healthy 7-pound son.

Slowly, the fatigue returned and within months after Henry’s birth, Purvis’ health took another downhill turn.

In July 1996, she developed pancreatitis, an infection or inflammation of the pancreas.

Her blood pressure soared “and they thought I was going to have a stroke,” she said.

In August, she found a lump in her stomach beneath a lacy-looking rash.  She itched everywhere as the rash came and went elsewhere on her body.

“She would take a hairbrush and just scrape the bottoms of her feet sometimes,” Biernacki said.

She began having migraines that made it impossible to walk or sit up in a chair.

Crawling to the bathroom

Bedridden most of the time, she had to roll out of bed and crawl to the bathroom, head hanging between her shoulder blades.

Her speech became erratic, sometimes slurred and other times filled with shutters and stammers and long gaps between phrases and thoughts. 

“Mom was the only one I could communicate with when I felt that way.  She was the only one who could understand what I was trying to say.  I couldn’t stand for anyone else to be near me or touch me.  I couldn’t stand light in my eyes,” Purvis said.

When she was up to it, she tried her best to care for her new son.

Although it hurt to watch, Biernacki remembers, she stood by in silence as Purvis would struggle across the room on her hands and knees, dragging her baby beside her by his ankles, or on a blanket.

“I know it sounds cruel, but that was the only contact she had with him in those months,” she said.  “And I let her do that because she wasn’t bonding with Henry.  She was too sick.”

Desperate measures

Her doctor could not explain Purvis’ troubling symptoms, let alone suggest a treatment.

Desperate for relief, Purvis went with her grandmother to a holistic doctor in La Veta.  He cold offer no remedy.

But he called a few weeks later with the name of a researcher in California who had reported some success with other Gulf War veterans using a long-term antibiotic treatment.

Garth Nicolson became interested in the many strange symptoms being reported across the country after his daugher-in-law became ill upon her return from the war.

He also stirred new controversy with his theory that some aspects of the illness were contagious, at least among people who had repeated close contact with the ill veterans.

Nicolson claims he lost four teeth and part of his jawbone to unexplained abscesses similar to the ones his daughter-in-law experienced at the height of her illness.

His wife, Nancy, also a researcher, suffered other symptoms that were versions of the elusive Gulf War syndrome.

Nicolson believes he has isolated a bacteria that is responsible for some of the maladies reported by thousands of young veterans.  The bacteria—Mycoplasma fermentans incognitus—can cause numerous health problems, but can be killed over time with one or more of a certain family of antibiotics, he claims.

Obtaining relief

Any medication in the penicillin family actually nourishes the bug, he says, but some antibiotics in the tetracycline family (doxycycline, etc.) have proven effective.

Purvis began improving after the first six-week cycle of doxycycline.

“One day she couldn’t walk across the room.  The next month she walk to the driveway,” Biernacki said.

Soon she was well enough to move with husband, who finally found work in Pueblo, to a house around the corner from her mother.

Purvis has followed Nicolson’s prescribed regimen for nearly two years now and says she has experienced almost miraculous improvement.

But she still walks with a cane.  She still sometimes stutters and has trouble expressing herself verbally because she can’t speak quickly enough to keep up with her thoughts.

She tires easily and still gets frequent headaches, although their severity doesn’t compare to those she experienced during and in the months following her second pregnancy.

She gets frequent, unexplained dental abscesses and tries very easily.

“I can have severe, massive diarrhea one day and be constipated the next,” she said.  “And sometimes I can’t control my muscles.  When I’m in a full-blown attack, you’d think I had multiple sclerosis.”

Her last major attack happened at a doctor’s office in April, she said.

Because of her many symptoms, she has been declared permanently and fully disabled.

Her doctors warns her that she probably won’t live to much older than 50 unless a permanent cure is found very soon.