A Life of Comically Calamitous Close Calls: Selma, California (November 1987), Part Four

Victor Davis Hanson

I was feeling great by 1987, some eight years after my near-death experience in Greece.

True, I had been deemed a “failure” at 25 for having a PhD in Classics from Stanford only between 1980 to 1984 to prune vines, drive a tractor, and do manual farm chores, with a growing family of four and a yearly salary from the farm of $6,500.

But in 1984, Cal State Fresno called me after sitting on my teaching application for almost five years. They had one class in Latin offered each year and the German professor who taught it was temporarily sick.

I jumped at the chance.

By 1986, I was hired as a full-time but temporary lecturer and charged with creating a classics program—while teaching an overload of 10 classes a year, 5 a semester.

By 1987, I was on the tenure-track, had hired a second professor, and was searching for a third. At semester’s end, I was grading 200 blue books in five different classes and trying to finish a new book, The Western Way of War, after just publishing my thesis Warfare and Agriculture. The Dean asked me to lead a tour to Greece. Things were going well with my new salary of $23,000 and health insurance for all of us!

The only problem was that I was getting up at 5:00 AM, prepping for class, driving 30 miles to CSU, teaching 3-4 different classes every day, speeding home by 4:00 PM, and farming until 7:00 PM.

The harvest of 1984, my first year of teaching, was especially stressful. I was in charge of the raisin harvest, and my siblings the table grape harvest.

So somehow, I was to manage 25 workers on 90 acres of grapes though picking, turning, rolling, binning, and shaking. I don’t think I slept more than 5 hours that entire 1984 harvest. I was still too full of farming and too rusty from Classics after the five-year hiatus.

But as my dear mother reminded me, “You spent nine straight years getting your degrees; all that is in your head, so relax and let it come back.” My father, worried about my ratty appearance, gave me all his 1970s polyester suits. When I wore one the first (and only) time, a new colleague, said, “This isn’t Love Boat.”

I was always scrambling for my growing family—correcting extra papers for our department’s language exams, speaking for $100-200 at local community clubs, and peddling fruit once a week in Monterey at the farmers’ market.

Then in November right before the onset of the dead week before finals, I got a bad flu.

I slept the next five days, and corrected papers. On the sixth, I could hardly walk, finally no fever but extreme fatigue. After another week, I went to my wonderful rural doctor, who immediately gave me a test and said, “Victor, how did you manage to get mononucleosis at 34?” The spleen was swollen and the fatigue was getting worse.

I had made it through teaching to Christmas break and assumed I’d be fine by January.

Instead, I got worse. I could hardly walk. I couldn’t sleep. My jaw glands were like golf balls.

On and on the mono went. They gave me steroids. I went to specialists. One diagnosed me through a spinal tap and early MRI (“white dots”) as having multiple sclerosis.

Another insisted “Valley Fever.”

For the next six years, I kept working. I commuted 1991–93 to Stanford (410 miles round trip) every week as a visiting professor of classics and the next year a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

I went to a Stanford doctor. He said, “We saw an outbreak of mononucleosis at Lake Tahoe not long ago. I think there really is something called chronic mono, or inability to expel flares of the Epstein-Barr virus. They call it “chronic fatigue immunity deficiency syndrome.” All I know, is that it won’t kill you. Your immune system will adjust—and in a few years you may be fine.”
Not so reassuring.

I ignored all that and didn’t miss a day of work after the initial infection for the next six years from 1987 to 1994. I tried everything, even self-injections of an old drug called Kutapressin that seemed to help.

Insomnia meant rarely good sleep. It was like a constant low-grade flu (oddly similar to two later bouts of long Covid). I went from 195 pounds to 150 and had zero appetite.

What caused it? The same old hyper/defective immune system? The stress in 1987 when my quite healthy mother suddenly was dying of brain cancer at 65?

My father drinking in despair?

The farm losing money each year? The impossibility of teaching 10 classes, a 70-mile round-trip commute, zero money, and lots of bills—with mono?

Trying to write two books and teach 10 classes a year? Massive layoffs at CSU during the 1993 budget crisis? I never knew.

My rural doctor, the saintly Dr. Sorensen, who had seen everything, simply told me “Slow down and you’ll eventually wear this out.”

I took his advice and on one day in May 1994, I slept 7 hours nonstop. That continued for a week. The next week the muscle cramps went away. The next week, the eye doctor told me my eye pressure was headed back to normal. Doc Sorensen said the mono spot tests were normal again.

I had a sense of exhilaration after six years that I’ve never quite had since.

Alive! Healthy! And so much to do! I started lifting weights again. I jogged. I returned to work on the farm.

I had a beer for the first time in six years. I had coffee again. My dad and I listened to Rush every morning at the farm. He and I talked every day, and most about my deceased mom, the California appellate court judge (August 1989).

Then one day, about week three into my new healthy life, the neurologist who had said “MS” called about the follow-up. I told him the good news.

He said, “Great, but this may be a chronic autoimmune upregulation problem and not the first time you said you had post-viral fatigue. Be careful, it likely will haunt you from now on. Oh, by the way, have your doctor check serum tryptase; we saw some patients with neuropathies, insomnia, and flu-like symptoms like you with high levels of tryptase.”

Nice guy to remind me of that, but I never did “check that.”

Yet he was absolutely correct as I learned over the next 30 years.

Could I have prevented all this? Perhaps by taking two months off work. Turning down the Stanford two-year appointment. Quitting farming for good. Giving up on The Western Way of War and never starting The Other Greeks.

Or so I think sometimes…