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Top Doctors for Women

Okay, ladies. If there’s one lesson to be learned on the next few pages, it’s the importance of taking charge. Enough with putting off that doctor’s visit or thinking it’s too late to ditch bad habits. We hope the stories of how five women trumped recent health scares will inspire you to treat your body well, whether it’s overcoming the fear of bad news or finding the motivation to live your best life. (If you won’t listen to us, listen to Oprah.) Here's to all of Rhode Island's incredible physicians and to the women below, who remind us that being a good patient is as important as having a great doctor.

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Baby Steps
You may think you want to be a child again, until you have to relearn to walk, talk and eat. After a mysterious disease forced her to do exactly that, Fanny Kwolek is happy to feel like herself.

Fanny Kwolek is instantly charming, the kind of lively Italian grandmother who tells stories with her hands and won’t let you out of her kitchen without taking some food with you. It’s hard to imagine that a year ago she struggled to walk, talk or eat.
Her illness started as a mystery. Just weeks after she had a dental plate in her mouth replaced, Fanny had trouble swallowing. Her daughter-in-law, Kathy, brought her back to the dentist to have the plate resized, but her symptoms only grew more severe. She choked and gagged on her food. She slurred her words. “It was scary,” Fanny says. Repeated trips to the dentist produced no answers, nor did a visit with an ear, nose and throat specialist. Soon, Fanny was having trouble holding her head up. She 
hunched over when she walked and had difficulty keeping her balance.

“It was frightening for all of us,” says Kathy, whose family lives next door and watched Fanny deteriorate almost overnight, shedding thirty pounds from her 
already petite frame. Her doctor soon recognized that the dental plate was a red herring and sent her to Dr. Elaine Jones, 
a neurologist at Roger Williams Medical Center. Jones immediately noticed the way Fanny’s speech and posture worsened the longer she talked and walked, and diagnosed her with myasthenia gravis, a disease that causes the muscles to become easily depleted. “It’s a problem with the communication between the nerve and muscle,” explains Jones. “It’s fairly rare, and tricky to pick up, but that fatiguing aspect kind of clues you in.”

The cause of this neuromuscular disease isn’t well understood — a tumor in the thymus gland can sometimes be the culprit, but Jones isn’t sure what triggered Fanny’s condition. “Myasthenia is in the same category as lupus and MS,” says Jones. “We don’t understand why they happen — it’s possible that a virus causes the immune system to rev up and make cells that break down your own tissue.”

Like the diagnosis, treating the disease also proved to be a matter of trial and error. Fanny’s symptoms didn’t respond to the medications typically prescribed for the disease, and her stooped walk was uncommon. “Myasthenia usually affects the face and throat,” Jones says. While she worked to find relief for Fanny, the eighty-two-year-old began the exhausting pro-cess of relearning how to chew, swallow, talk and walk. Her days and months became a revolving door of speech, physical and occupational therapists. “The first couple of weeks, I was going crazy,” Fanny recalls. “Mashing food, learning to drink, learning ‘do re mi fa so’….” She laughs and shrugs. “What are you going to do?”

It was about six months before a medication finally worked to restore Fanny’s functionality — almost immediately, she felt like her old self again. Still, she resists the urge to ignore doctor’s orders now that she is feeling good, keeping up with the twice-daily exercises her physical therapists prescribed to keep her muscles active. “Sometimes I don’t feel like doing them, but I don’t want to go through that again!” Fanny says.

Her ordeal was made easier by a wonderful team of nurses, therapists and doctors, says Kathy. Both women rave about Jones. “She’s just special. She listens,” Kathy says as Fanny nods her approval. “It was a real partnership between us. You can tell she cares.”

The feeling is mutual. “One of the things that struck me about Fanny and her family was their persistence in continuing to ask questions until we got answers,” says Jones. “They were very good at commu   nicating — never complaining, but telling me the specifics of what she was dealing with and any new issues that came up.”

Fanny laughs when asked how she kept her good attitude, but her daughter-in-law doesn’t let her get away without some praise. “It comes naturally to her,” Kathy says. “She has a strong spiritual background and she just never gives up. With everything she had to go through, she never complained.”

Fanny, of course, waves off the compliment. “My father used to tell me the more you complain, the more people will push you down,” she says. “He always told me to try to be different. Try to be a fighter.”

For the list of this year's Top Docs for Women, click here.