The Patient

The recent (and very good!) Barbara Walters documentary reminded me of a world event that coincided with a personal crisis causing me to miss out on a once in a lifetime opportunity. The upside: It also left me with a very funny memory.

It was March 1979, when I found myself with a mysterious illness that would later be diagnosed as the auto immune disease, Sarcoidosis. I would fully recover with no serious long-term effects, but at the time it was shocking and scary.

I was working for the Secret Service as a seemingly healthy twenty-one-year-old when I was plagued by a weird array of symptoms. After seeing the White House physician, I was sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital.

This just happened to be the same time as the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty between President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Begin of Israel.

Our Special Agent in Charge knew how interested I was in the historic event and had arranged for a coworker and me to attend the ceremony on the White House lawn. Only now I would miss it.

On the day of the ceremony a corpsman wheeled a television set onto the ward and set it up next to my bed. The nurse asked, “What’s going on?”

“The White House ordered it,” the corpsman said. “So she could watch the signing of the peace treaty.”

The nurse turned to me and said, “Who are you?!”

Little did I know that the White House physician had been calling to check on my status, so there was already a curiosity surrounding the young patient claiming to be a clerk for the U.S. Secret Service.