I was taking up to 60 mg of prednisone a day, which was very high by normal standards. However, this day-in, day-out regime of powerful drugs, including steroids, was an entirely different matter. And like lots of people in high-pressure environments (or who liked to stay at the party till the bitter end), I occasionally took a pill for a headache, a hangover, or to help me sleep. Up until then I’d been sick once or twice in my life, and always with the kind of illness that a short course of antibiotics could knock out of me. WHAM! The welts came back, the pain returned, and the itching recommenced with a vengeance. If I stopped taking the pills or even cut back . How lucky am I to be living in 1998?īut here’s the hitch. Grateful and exhausted, I thought to myself, Wow, the marvels of modern medicine. As long as I took them in the morning and the evening, I was all good. The doctors hit upon a combination of four pills, and as soon as I took them, the symptoms disappeared. I finally received a diagnosis-chronic urticaria, an autoimmune disease that leads the body to respond to virtually any pressure or touch with a profound and painful allergic reaction. Vincent’s Hospital, where they took blood, biopsied me, administered an assortment of intravenous drugs, tried MRI scans and ultrasounds, and observed me for a week. I was achy, miserable, and in so much pain that I couldn’t sit or lie still (imagine how much fun it must have been for the person in the seat next to me). What followed were the worst thirteen hours of my life. I finally called my dad in Australia, who urged me to come home right away, so I dashed to the airport and caught the 10 p.m.
He dosed me with anti-inflammatories and shot me up with an EpiPen, which brought almost no relief. I called the concierge, who summoned a doctor. I started going through scenarios-had I touched a poisonous plant, eaten something that disagreed with me? Nothing came to mind. I looked in the mirror and it seemed like the Elephant Man was staring back at me. Within an hour, the welts had spread across my entire body and I felt like an overinflated balloon: My nose, mouth, and ears were covered. I started to scratch them furiously, but no matter how much I scratched, I couldn’t satisfy the itch. I was kicking back, watching a bit of TV, when all of a sudden my hands and feet got super-itchy and covered in welts. I had just finished a round of golf and I was pretty pleased with myself. In July of 1998 I was in San Diego, California, on a business trip, comfortably settled into a suite at the Four Seasons hotel. After all, I’m a guy, and as long as I’m making money and my friends think I’m funny, everything must be okay. In hindsight, I reckon the only thing I was exercising was denial! Even though I was starting to buy bigger sizes and leave my shirttails untucked, I didn’t worry too much. And I kept fooling myself, even after I said goodbye to both the trading floor and rugby at the age of twenty-eight to start my own business even after this change had me sitting at a desk, staring at a computer terminal during my waking hours and worrying 24/7 about every decision and even after my waistband went from 36 to 44 inches practically overnight. Because I played competitive rugby, I fooled myself into thinking I was the same athletic guy I had been in high school. I approached my playtime the way I tackled my work, with a passion for excess that included drinking, smoking, lavish dinners out, and a lot of parties. By the time my friends were graduating from college, I was already making over a half million dollars a year and had the lifestyle to go with it. The pressure was enormous, but the incredible adrenalin rush was addictive to a young, cocky guy like me-and the pay was astronomical. I stood in the pit all day alongside other equally type-A traders, calling out numbers, trying to buy low and sell high, and watching my own net worth rise or fall with every split-second decision. Rather than following my father and brother into medicine, I had finished school at seventeen, skipped college, and headed straight for a career in finance, where I found my calling as a trader on the Sydney Futures Exchange. There I was, a thirty-two-year-old guy at the top of my game, making money, on the go 24/7, living and working and playing large. I thought I was a Master of the Universe.
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