Amber's War

Every morning is a private war for Dixon High School graduate Amber Oerding.  As she gets out of bed a switch turns on from within and instantly her body is wracked with pain.

She struggles to do what most people take for granted. It isn’t until Amber swallows a pill that the pain subsides. On good days the pain stays away for the rest of the day, on bad ones it will return to make her life miserable.

“It takes everything I have to get up in the morning, just walking … it hurts really bad,” Amber said

Amber doesn’t look sick. She works hard to make it appear that way. She stands about 5 feet, 4 inches, has long blonde hair, kind eyes, a pretty face, and a quiet strength in her voice that tells of the pain she has seen in her 18 years.

Amber’s enemy is her body. It began attacking her thyroid gland when she was two years old. Through the years, Amber’s parents – Sharon, a Crohn’s Disease patient, and Steve, a stage-4 cancer survivor – did everything they could to figure out what was wrong with their eldest child.

They took her to doctors, who in turn ran every test in the book. Each one failing to unlock the mysterious disease that was plaguing Amber.

“At 2, she would complain and say ‘My heart hearts,’ and ‘I can’t breath,’” Amber’s mom, Sharon, said.

Amber’s symptoms got worse. She would fall asleep at the dinner table and at school. Teachers at Antelope Creek Elementary School in Rocklin thought that Amber was slacking off. But her parents knew better.

The symptoms would continue in Amber and by the time she was seven years old and in the second grade, her father Steven made a breakthrough.

Amber’s dad noticed a lump in his daughter’s throat, right about the area where her thyroid resides. He went to doctors with his observation and another round of tests began on Amber.

Dad’s discovery introduced the family to Dr. Hashimoto Hakaru - essentially turning him into a household name.

“They (the doctors) never found Hashimoto, we did,” Sharon said. “(Her doctor) did all the normal pediatrician tests you can think of. It’s extremely rare in children. One out of 100,000 have it.”

Born in 1881, Hashimoto was the first person to identify an autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system attacks the thyroid gland, killing the cells within it.

The symptoms that Hashimoto spoke of perfectly described what Amber has been going through since her early childhood  – pain, weakness in muscles, fatigue along with several others – prompting doctors to diagnose her with Hashimoto Thyroiditis, the name given to Hashimoto’s discovery.

For Amber and her family, it was both a blessing and a curse. The Oerdings finally knew what was wrong with Amber, but what followed the diagnosis would make Amber’s life even more difficult than it already was.

Amber was taken from her second-grade classroom and moved to the special needs class at Antelope Creek Elementary. All of a sudden, the students she had come to know as her friends teased her about being with the “special” kids.

It was a cruelty that Amber was not used to, but made even worse by the serious disease she did not fully understand.

“I was considered a freak,” Amber said.

Amber quickly found that her new classmates were kinder and gentler than her peers in the second grade.

She gained an ally in Mrs. Dunn, her special needs instructor, who used innovative ways to help her make the grade at Antelope Creek Elementary. With the help of people such as Dunn, family and friends, the quiet girl with the seemingly unrecognizable thyroid condition made it through elementary and junior high schools.

When Amber moved to Dixon during her freshman year at Dixon High School, she would have to tell her new friends, instructors and just about anyone she came into contact with about her disease. The first day at the new high school was the first test of her new life in Dixon.

“My first day of school, I barely made it through because I was so stressed out,” she said.

But with words of encouragement from her mom, Amber made it through the first day. Dixon High teachers knew of Amber’s condition and many of them made special accommodations for her. Some gave her extra time on her tests. Others would extend due dates of her assignments, Amber said.

At first, Amber hid signs from her peers that she was in pain, anxious, fatigued and stressed out.

“It would hurt, you kind of have to act like you aren’t sick, that’s why people don’t believe me (that I’m sick),” she said.

Then, her feet began giving her problems. It was the first sign to her friends in Dixon that all was not well. Amber underwent a surgery during her freshman year in which doctors fused her ankle and put a titanium rod in her foot. The surgery came with a recovery time of three or four weeks.

The following year, Amber underwent another foot surgery – another rod in her foot that would improve her mobility and lessen her pain. It too carried a recovery time of three to four weeks.

While the pain in her foot subsided the curiosity and the whispers among her friends grew. It was time for Amber to introduce them to Hashimoto.

Some of her friends were supportive, others not so much. They would tell her things like “Oh, I hope you feel better,” as if it were a cold that Amber had caught that would go away with a nap and some chicken soup. Some of her friends distanced themselves from Amber after learning about her condition, she said.

“I’ve noticed that I do have some friends, they are afraid to see me sick and I think I understand,” she said. “Most of them don’t understand.”

And then there were other friends, who learned about the disease and genuinely cared about Amber.

“Toward the end of the (school) year my friend (Tiffany Leider), she came here,” Amber recalls. “I was throwing up, I had dark circles under my eyes and my friend stood there with me. That’s the first time anyone saw me like that. It felt scary, but then I realized that she cared about me.”

Tiffany saw Amber at her worst and cried with her, kept her company and showed that she was there for her, disease or not.

It wasn’t easy for Amber to come clean to her friends after what she endured during the second grade, but in a testament to her spirit, she did. And in doing so, opened up part of her life to them and learned that there were indeed people in her life, other than her family, that cared deeply for her.

On May 5, Amber’s disease began to flare up badly and she missed her last month of school. Amber has missed out on school days before and she is no stranger to it. But this time it would mean that she would miss her senior class trip to Disneyland.

The blow was lessened somewhat by a friend who had brought her a sweatshirt from the class trip to warm her during the uncharacteristically cold and rainy May weather.

The disease would make her miss fun, end-of the-year activities at DHS, but Amber would not be denied her graduation ceremony. With the help of her friends and the encouragement of her family, Amber walked the stage during the Class of Firsts’ graduation. Amber’s 12 years of schooling was over, and a new chapter was waiting to be written.

Amber is still sick. She is a candidate for thyroid surgery that could either cure her of her disease or make it worse. Her immune system, having no more thyroid to kick around, could set its sights on another organ, said her mother. It’s a risk that Amber and her family think deeply about.

Meanwhile, Amber has goals and she is not going to let her thyroid slow her down. Come the fall, she will attend Woodland Community College, with a goal of studying at UC Davis and eventually becoming someone, perhaps a teacher, who works with special-needs children – it’s a profession that Amber can relate to.

“I think the main thing that I want people to know is that we are not that much different than you and don’t want your pity,” she said. “We just want people to love us.”