This is not a story about an aspartame survivor. This is about an innocent victim. I'm writing it as a memorial to a dear friend. She was a lovely person, the kindest, most generous woman I ever knew, and the world is poorer without her.

My fondest wish for everyone is that you should drop dead in good health, thusly: you're about 90 years old, give or take a couple, and you're feeling pretty good for a kid your age. You've been out playing golf all afternoon, and now you're having a lil drinkiepoo while you're getting all spiffed up in some snazzy new duds for your date for dinner and dancing with somebody exciting. All of a sudden, out of the blue, your body falls to the floor and leaves your spirit standing there saying, "Hey! Wait a minute! I got a date tonight!"

If you have to go, that's the way to do it.

Unfortunately, (leaving aside accidents and overdoses), not many people are fortunate enough to be able to charge up to death's door and jump right through. Instead they have to crawl to it on their hands and knees, suffering and in pain. That is certainly true of aspartame victims.

No one knows whether my friend Irene would have been one of the lucky ones or not. She died of aspartame poisoning in 1993. At the time, no one knew WHAT was wrong with her, but now that I know about aspartame's symptoms, I'm completely convinced that that's what did her in. She liked diet pop so much that she carried a case of it in the trunk of her car  she had a thing about putting money in a pop machine. After she discovered Crystal Lite, she raved about how yummy it was and drank it by the gallon. =0(

She told me she had a whole bunch of things wrong with her, but didn't go into every single little gory detail, so I only know the big stuff. For one thing, her blood pressure was out of control in spite of medication to keep it down. She had a big blind spot in one eye that the eye doctor said was caused by a bruise on the back of her eyeball, without saying how a person might acquire such a thing or when she might expect it to clear up. (It never did.) The main thing that was bothering her was her balance. She had dizzy spells sometimes, where the room would seem to be spinning, but the worst of her equilibrium difficulty was that fairly often when she thought she was standing up straight, she wasn't, and would fall over.

She went to the doctor about it, and he sent her to a neurologist, and between them they did every test known to man twice, and nobody could find anything wrong. Meanwhile, Irene  in spite of having nothing findable wrong with her  was falling down constantly. This is not cool for a person her age, since old hips break easily. (If she were still alive, she'd be about 80 now, and I'm willing to bet she'd still be volunteering at the hospital and most of the other things she did in her normal round of good deeds.) Finally the doctor decided it MUST be her heart, even though he couldn't really put his finger on what might be wrong there. So Irene had a big, hairy multiple bypass, and when she recovered from that, she was just as inclined to tip over as before.

Between her bypass operation in September and her death in January, she was in and out of the hospital at least four times and had to spend a couple of weeks in a nursing home. She lost so much weight she hardly looked like herself any more. Then her kidneys failed, completely and permanently. She went into the hospital again, and that's where she was at the end. It was a couple of days after her birthday  I didn't send her a happy birthday card because it just didn't seem appropriate somehow  but I did send her a "hang in there" card. Her husband told me that he read her my card, she smiled at what I wrote on it, and a few minutes later she was gone. I feel like I was the last person outside of her family to speak to her.

I loved my friend Irene  I still love her, and it's making my cry to write this, even though I know she's safe and happy in heaven  and probably having a fine time flirting with my husband, now that I think about it. =0)

See ya later, Irene. Love ya, kiddo.