A New Medical History

I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday with a new eye doctor. I was nervous. He is a specialist.

Nine years ago, at age 50, when I discovered my Dad who raised me was not my biological father, one of the realities that struck me was that half the health history I had been sharing with my doctors up to that point was a complete lie.

As my regular check-ups came rolling around, I had to face the stress and anxiety of writing things like ” I don’t know” on forms or crossing out what was already there in my Dad’s history because it didn’t apply to me anymore.

Any history of breast cancer? I don’t know.
Any history of heart issues? I don’t know.
Any history of mental illness or depression? I don’t know.

This was a big deal, and it scared me not knowing if there was something in my DNA that me or my girls should be monitoring. How do you live a life of prevention if you don’t know what to prevent?

Like any good genealogist, I consumed myself in research on *Joe’s side. I gathered every death record and searched for every obituary. I kept a spreadsheet on ages and causes of death. It was quite sobering when I compared my Dad’s side to Joe’s side. This was my side now, I had to keep reminding myself.

Right off the bat, I realized Joe’s family didn’t live as long as Dad’s. My Dad lived to be 86, and his parents lived to be 96 and 97. Joe died at 77, and his parents died at 76 and 82.

As far as illnesses, my Dad had pancreatic cancer, which was horrible, to say the least.  But beyond that, there was nothing extraordinary for anyone else, and everyone lived well into their mid to late 80’s and beyond. On the other hand, Joe’s side had shortened life spans across the board due to congestive heart failure, heart attacks, strokes, hypothyroidism, stomach cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.

But, the one condition that scared me the most was the macular degeneration I learned Joe developed in the last decade of his life.

Macular Degeneration left Joe almost entirely blind and was paired with a host of other conditions like diabetes that made his health very poor in his last years. When I discovered this information, I immediately remembered my 23andMe health reports. According to 23andMe, of the two most common variants they test that are associated with an increased risk of developing macular degeneration, I had both of them, unfortunately. And now I knew for sure that I had a close family history of it.  That’s why I visited this highly recommended eye specialist yesterday to share my new medical history and for him to screen me for any early onset.

I recently saw a video of Joe about one year before he died, and it was shocking to me how frail and shaky he looked at 76 years old. That doesn’t seem very old to me—maybe because I’m quickly coming up on 60 myself. But in my mind, I remember Joe as larger-than-life, vibrant, tall, and strong. His health obviously robbed him of all that when this video was shot. It made me sad.

Of course, having conditions like all of the ones on Joe’s side is not uncommon to anyone’s family tree and doesn’t mean I will develop any of them. I realize that. These days, we also have preventative medicine and education on lifestyle modifications that didn’t exist even 30 years ago. But it doesn’t change the fact that I wasn’t given a chance to start mindfully preventing any of these things until I was 50. And what’s more, because my new half siblings don’t have any interest in communicating with me, if I weren’t a genealogist, I would have no idea about the conditions I did discover. Thank goodness I’m a genealogist. Otherwise, I would be walking around not knowing what could kill me.

If nothing else, an **NPE, an adoptee, or a donor-conceived person has the fundamental human right to know their biological medical history. We all deserve at least that, don’t we? If you don’t want anything to do with us, fine, but can you at least tell us if we are passing on something to our children that could affect their whole lives? Isn’t that the decent thing to do?

Back with my new ophthalmologist, I was anxious and fidgety for the entire exam.

“Your optic nerves are pristine, Jenny,” he said while he peered deep inside my eyeballs with his light.

“There are no signs of pre-macular degeneration at all. These are the healthiest eyes I’ve seen all day, in fact,” he said, patting me on the hand.

I shared my DNA discovery with him earlier, and he was compassionate and kind. I could see on his face that he truly felt for me. I think that is why he took extra time to go over lifestyle suggestions with me that will give me the best chance to keep my eyes as healthy as possible. He couldn’t guarantee anything, of course, but he gave me hope that I had the knowledge to do what I could.

Knowledge is absolutely everything.

*Psuedonym
**NPE is an acronym for “Not Parent Expected.” It is also used to describe a “Non-paternal event.”

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This is my NPE story of discovering in 2015 that my Dad was not my biological Dad. If you’d like to follow along, I encourage you to start at my first post of the series HERE.