A Real Comeback : After 2 1/2 Years, UCLA’s Gail Devers Gets Graves Disease Under Control

I like happy endings. The only trouble with them is that there aren’t enough of them.

Gail Devers may be one. She’s down to one thyroid pill a day; her beeper lets her know when it’s 8 p.m. California time, wherever she happens to be.

“I look at it as a second chance at life,” she said the other day with her smile and her big eyes shining.

But she remembers when she couldn’t stand to see her bloated body in the mirror or to see her skin-and-bones figure. It used to go like that, back and forth, up and down.

She’s 5-3 and 123 pounds. You have to understand how an athlete, a 25-year-old woman comfortable enough about herself to wear a lace camisole beneath a tailored jacket, feels about that.

She remembers that she cried a lot; so did her mother.

And she remembers when the doctor told her she’d been about two days away from amputation of her feet. Next Friday night she’s running in the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden. Last September, she set the American record in the 100-meter hurdles.

What she has is Graves Disease, a thyroid condition for which there is treatment but no cure. Our president has a similar condition. She kids, “I’m their long-lost granddaughter.” Except that she had a nightmare of 2 1/2 years before her condition was controlled.

Circumstance makes terrible illness worse. Hemingway wrote of the young soccer player who has lost the use of his leg to World War I. Think of the woman whose physical life was running, losing her feet. “I do think about it every day,” she said. “We take things for granted; we can get up and walk across the room. Last March, running was out of the question. People thought I’d never walk.

“Now I think if I could get over that, no hurdle is too high.”

She’d made a play on words, kidding herself about her specialty. She has the rare gift of plunging into the grimmest of tales and coming up by kidding herself.

She got as far as the semifinal heat at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and considered opinion was that she was worn out from the long season in which she tied Jackie Joyner’s American record. It wasn’t until last May that she ran again.

For a long time, she didn’t know what her problem was and neither did her doctors. The symptoms were apparent enough. Her weight went up to 137 pounds.

“I looked like a blimp, the Pillsbury Doughboy in the mirror,” she said. “I wouldn’t look in the mirror.”

Her weight plunged until she refused to get back on the scale. “I didn’t look until I was back up to 97, so I don’t know how low I was,” she said.

Sometimes her thyroid was overactive and sometimes it wasn’t active at all. Sometimes she couldn’t sleep and sometimes people couldn’t wake her. She’d lose vision in one eye for periods of time during terrible headaches. Her menstrual periods were so severe that she wouldn’t leave the house. She’d sit in darkened rooms for days. She lost her hair.

“I looked so sickly I wouldn’t let anyone take a picture of me,” she said. “I wouldn’t go places where I might be seen.” She dealt with coach Bobby Kersee and few others.

Friends speculated that she might have AIDS or have a drug problem. She says she knew better. “I had a feeling like I was going crazy,” she said. “Bobby would tell me to go to the other side of the track and bring a hurdle or something. I’d get there and not remember what I was there for.”

Now she can laugh at herself again. At the time, she was working against the fear that her track career was finished. She went back to school for a master’s degree in child development. She took a job in an insurance office to occupy her before practice. She took a job as assistant track coach at UCLA; if she couldn’t run, she could teach.

When her thyroid condition was diagnosed, it was a mixed blessing. She was put on radiation therapy. About then, the traditional little voice told her to cheer up, things could be worse, and then things were worse. The effect of the radiation was too much, too soon.

She resumed jogging and the next day she had blood blisters on her feet. A podiatrist told her not to get so “all stressed-out” and gave her ointment for athlete’s foot.

This sounds like a Russian novel. It’s not a tale of an athlete finding health through the virtue of sport; running had nothing to do with making her well again. It is the tale of Gail Dever’s endurance. It is how she got here from there.

She was told to use a commercial foot preparation. “My feet swelled so (much) people thought I was wearing five pairs of socks,” she said. “I went out and bought men’s house slippers, Size 11 and 12.

“I cried the whole time. It was so bad I crawled to the bathroom.”

When her knees bled, Gail’s mother moved into the house in Palmdale. “She carried me to the bathroom,” Gail said. “I had gone back to the infant stage.”

She can’t identify the point where treatment began to save her life. She knows the doctors thought she might have cancer. She knows when they considered amputation of her feet.

Last April, she got on the track to jog wearing socks. Not long afterward, she was competing. Last summer, she won the U.S. Nationals at Randall’s Island. In September, she finished second in the World Championships in Tokyo. A week later at Berlin, she blew away almost the same field to set the American record. “It means,” she said, “I’m back where I finished 1988.”

It also means she can comb her hair in five curls on her forehead. “I get a lot of compliments: ‘Finally, the old Gail is back; you used to be so sad all the time,’ ” she said. “My mother cries when she sees interviews. She had to bathe me, see the sores all over my body. That was her baby.

“Me, I’m always happy.”

It’s just one pill a day.