Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir (24 page)

I have sometimes wondered whether God was punishing me for the abortion I had years ago by allowing my son to have autism. Or by giving me so many health issues. Or by having my parents go through such a painful divorce. I know God had nothing to do with those situations. But here’s one thing I do know: My view of God as a chastising tyrant rather than as a compassionate father was formed long before I lived through any of these heartaches. If something bad is happening in my life, my knee-jerk response is to believe that I must have done something bad to cause it. Day by day, one thought at a time, I’m working to replace that view with another—that as mysterious as God’s ways are to me, I have to believe that He’s much more of a healer than a judge.

As much as I don’t understand religion, I do often feel God’s presence. I know He exists. I know He loves me. I have no doubt that He has sustained me through some of the most difficult circumstances of my life. And once I take God out of the confines of the strict religion box I first learned to put Him in, I can see His care manifested in a hundred small ways. It shows up in the form of my children’s laughter. Or on a day when my body feels good and my energy level is a little higher than usual. Or in a simple act of kindness extended to me by a stranger. I don’t go to church very often—but for me, God isn’t in those four walls, and sometimes just being back in a sanctuary makes me feel as condemned as I did as a girl. Yet I don’t need to sit in a church to experience the best of who God is—a comforter, a teacher, a protector, a friend.

TOWARD THE END
of 2006, I got a call from a successful entertainer—to protect her privacy, I’m not going to share her name. I’d been telling her just how desperate I was to leave Blackground. “You have to get away from Barry,” she told me. “It’s your life—you need to take it back.” By that time, I was so tired of fighting with Barry.

Not long after that conversation, I got another call—this one was from my fairy godbrother. “How you doin’, Toni Braxton?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “life is challenging right now.”

Prince promised to help me, and he kept his word: Later that week, Prince had someone from his team call me with the names of a few attorneys. Now you can see why I’ll always love Prince—he’s the one entertainer who has always reached out to me when I’m down. In fact, once when he was on tour himself, he had his team call me up and ask me if I wanted to be his opening act. The timing and details didn’t work out in the case—but I thought it was very sweet of him to look out for ways to help me out. I will always love him.

I didn’t even put myself through the trauma of telling Barry that I was planning to leave his label. Instead, I hired an attorney and went straight into litigation. On January 12, 2007, in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, I filed a lawsuit for $10 million against Blackground. In the suit, I gave the details of how Barry failed to live up to the standards of a good manager. Barry hired his own lawyers to gear up for a fight, and as the back-and-forth between our two camps began, I could see that we were in for a long, painful, and expensive legal battle. Once I sued, Barry eventually countersued to dispute my claim that he had been dishonest with me as a way to lure me away from Arista. In his suit, he claimed that I was dropped from Arista because of poor record sales. Although we disagreed I was so ready to just move on with my life and break free from Barry. That’s why I chose to settle out of court.

I was finally positioned to get my career back on track.

“W
hy are you always working so much?” my mother would often fuss. “Six weeks after your last C-section, you were back at work. Keri is very talented—so what is his contribution?” I silently had the same question—and it was starting to cause the kind of resentment that can weigh down a marriage. Toward the end of 2007, I took a two-week vacation from my Vegas show because I was feeling so physically and emotionally exhausted. I knew then that I needed Keri to become a stronger financial contributor. “We’ve gotta figure something else out because I don’t know if I can keep doing these shows,” I told Keri. “Let’s come up with a plan. I am tired of working this hard.”

Don’t get me wrong: I believe that Keri wanted to earn more money for our family, and he has always been a hard worker. But from his perspective, working for me didn’t leave him with enough time to pursue other income. I understood his point—which is why I suggested that he stop overseeing my sound production and instead take on other projects. “Maybe you should compliment him more,” my mother suggested. “That’ll show him how much you appreciate him. Sometimes men need a push.” I already felt like I was doing that—but I tried to do it even more.

In the middle of all this, Keri and I were doing our best to make sure Diezel received the highest-quality care—and he was making great progress. We got him several types of intense therapy: occupational therapy, applied behavior analysis (ABA), and speech. Deciding on all his programs and juggling the hours of weekly therapies often creates a wedge between the parents of autistic children. Keri and I were no exception. We never really talked about how stressful it all was (in our relationship, neither of us was great at communicating) so I think we stashed away our feelings and kept moving.

I dealt with my anxiety by staying in survival mode. I just worked. And worked. And worked. Until the day in April 2008 when I started feeling absolutely miserable. “My whole body feels so weak,” I told Keri. I think he believed I was becoming a hypochondriac, because something always seemed to be wrong with me. I’d been back and forth to the doctors, and no one could figure out exactly what was causing my fatigue; they knew I was anemic—my hemoglobin was so low that I’d started going in for iron transfusions every Monday. At times when I was onstage, my heart would suddenly start beating so fast that it felt like it would fall right out of my chest—but then a few moments later, it would go away. When I’d go to the doctors, the tests wouldn’t turn up any new issues.
Maybe I just need to laugh
, I thought.
That’s always the best medicine
. So I went to see Wanda Sykes, who is one of my favorite female comedians. She did crack me up—but afterward, I still couldn’t get it together.

In the next two days, I became even more fatigued. But I wanted to spend some time with the boys, so we gathered around our television upstairs to watch Jerry Seinfeld’s
Bee Movie
. Halfway through the film, I felt a pressure in my chest—as if I was trying to walk forward while a three-hundred-pound football player was pushing me back. I made my way down the stairs, one slow step at a time, and I checked my blood pressure using an at-home monitor. It was high as hell—180 over 118. I chewed a couple of Tums (I thought my chest pain could be indigestion) and walked back up the stairs—but I was so frail that I had to stop and curl up right there at the top of the limestone staircase. “Keri,” I whispered, “I have to go to the hospital right now.” He rushed over, scooped me up, left the boys with the nanny, and sped off.

The hospital was only two miles away—but it felt like two million. “You’re going to have to run these red lights,” I whispered to Keri. He shifted into high gear and flew through the next five intersections. Soon after, we pulled up to the front entrance of the ER and Keri helped me out of the car. As he went to park, I practically crawled my way through the glass doors. Do you remember how slowly Mr. Tudball from
The Carol Burnett Show
used to walk? Well, that’s how slowly I was walking.

“May I help you?” a receptionist brusquely asked when he spotted me just inside the front door. I could barely talk because I was so out of breath, which is why I whispered something inaudible. “Is it your throat?” he asked, pressing me.

“There’s an elephant sitting on me right now,” I finally managed to say loudly enough for him to hear. I placed my palm over my chest.

Seconds later, a nurse put me in a wheelchair and rushed me off to an exam room. She checked my blood pressure, gave me some baby aspirin, and drew my blood. Soon after, the doctor came in. “Your troponin levels are elevated,” he said. “That could be the sign of a heart attack.” They later did an EKG, an echocardiogram, an MRI—the works. “Your blood work reads like you’ve had a heart attack—but your EKG doesn’t,” the doctor said. “I’m going to keep you in the hospital for a couple days to do more tests and to monitor you.”

During my stay, a male nurse came in for what I thought was a routine check—but he instead had a question for me. “Someone from the
Enquirer
wants to talk to you,” he whispered. “Can you do an interview?” I stared at him in silence. I was on so much Ativan that I was barely even conscious—but I was awake enough to know that he was crossing the line. Apparently, someone from the
Enquirer
had agreed to pay this nurse if he could get me to talk. I immediately asked to be released from that hospital against the doctors’ orders. After I signed a slew of paperwork, I then left through a back entrance so I could avoid the paparazzi.

My sister Tamar and her fiancé, Vince Herbert, who is a record company executive, came to see me. At the time, the two were planning their fall wedding, and they stopped by my place to check on me. My mother also flew in. “You don’t look good, T,” Tamar said. Vince called his friend Mel at Interscope Records; Mel recommended that I see Dr. Shapira, a specialist in Los Angeles. I agreed—but I thought we could all just take the short drive from Vegas over to L.A. “You need to fly, T,” Vince said insistently. “You’re too sick to make the drive.” So Keri packed my suitcase, and my mother stayed with the boys. When we got to the airport check-in, the security people didn’t even want to let me onto the flight because I looked so ill. That’s just how much of a mess I was. Keri had to call and get clearance from my doctor; a fax was sent to airport officials, and they confirmed that I was indeed on my way to see a specialist. The airport officials reluctantly let me onto the flight.

When Dr. Shapira evaluated me, he said, “I can’t even believe they released you from the last hospital.” He’d only been planning to run some tests and then release me, but when he saw that my blood pressure was super high (200 over 122), he immediately admitted me to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. When Dr. Shapira noticed in my records that I’d previously seen Dr. Wallace, a rheumatologist in Los Angeles, he asked me why. “Because my white blood cell count was low,” I explained. So at that point, he decided to bring in Dr. Wallace to run some more tests on me, and one seemed to show that I had some kind of heart blockage. That’s why Dr. Wallace seemed to think I needed a heart transplant. “You have microvascular angina,” he told me. That news made me so hysterical that I had to be given an antianxiety medication. But after both of the doctors did some additional testing, they eventually ruled out the heart transplant and began considering other possibilities for what may be causing my condition.

Two weeks later, Dr. Shapira and Dr. Wallace gave me their conclusion: “You have lupus—and it’s the kind that attacks your organs—and yours is attacking your heart.” What looked like a heart condition was really just a sign that my body was in a lupus flare-up. When I heard this, I was far more relieved than I was scared. At last, I had an answer.

My diagnosis that day marked the beginning of my road to recovery—but it was also the end of my Vegas run. “You cannot do your show,” my doctor told me as he released me from the hospital. “That’s way too much singing and dancing around for five nights a week.” So between April and August 2008—the month that would’ve marked the completion of my contract with the Flamingo—I didn’t perform. All remaining shows were canceled and my room went dark.

LUPUS IS A
tough disease—and I chose not to reveal my diagnosis to the world right away. “If you tell people you have lupus,” my managers warned me, “you may not get work.” If people perceived me as too weak to work, I could have trouble getting record deals and acting roles. So right after the diagnosis, I kept my news to myself. Keri knew, of course, and so did my mother. But I waited awhile before I told everyone else. It was bad enough that they’d heard I’d had a heart scare; they didn’t also need to know that scare had turned out to be a life-threatening disorder.

Once the doctors sent me home with a gazillion meds, I did a lot of my own research on my condition. Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE is usually referred to as “lupus”) is a chronic autoimmune disorder that can affect any organ in the body. The immune system, which normally protects the body, forms antibodies that attack everything from the skin and the lungs to the joints, the kidneys, and even the brain. In my case, lupus affects my organs, and mostly my heart. One of the reasons lupus can be so hard to diagnose is because it often shows up in so many different forms—butterfly-like skin rashes, sore joints, renal failure, blood clots, angina, and chest pains, and even the kind of prolonged and unexplainable exhaustion I’d been experiencing for years. The condition is most common in females—and African-Americans, Asians, and Native Americans are particularly susceptible. More than 1.5 million Americans have the condition. Lupus has no known cure.

My doctors believe that I may have had lupus as far back as my early twenties—and with each passing year, as I pushed myself to work longer and harder, my body became weaker. One of my uncles once lost his life to lupus—but because his lupus was medically induced, I never connected it to the symptoms I’d been having. Researchers still don’t know what causes lupus—and though they suspect that there could be a genetic predisposition, there’s no scientific proof of that. But here’s one thing they are certain about: Stress makes lupus worse. A big part of managing my lupus involves managing my pace and workload.

My diagnosis further strained my relationship with Keri. Once I got out of the hospital, I again struck up the conversation—the one about his financial contribution. I wanted a real break. Keri did make an effort (for a time, he got into the real estate business, and after he made a sale, he once even paid my band’s salary for a week, which I thought was very kind of him). He also did some photography work for a short time. But the amount of money Keri could consistently contribute didn’t cover our family’s expenses.