Unbreakable: My New Autobiography (15 page)

‘Get Lisa to drive you to the hospital,’ I told him. But she was very heavily pregnant, plus she was asleep. I couldn’t help because I was miles away in Hidden Hills. He said he’d take himself to hospital. I told him to let me know when he got there. So he got himself to Cedars-Sinai and called me. They were admitting him for tests, he told me. ‘But I’m fine.’ This wasn’t true. Unbeknown to me, they took him in and operated on him immediately. He told me later, but said that he hadn’t wanted anyone to worry.

10

Stronger than Me

My brave boy Jack, with Pearl.

A
bout two weeks after Pearl was born, Jack was doing a series for the Syfy channel on haunted houses, and it was quite an active job. For one of the shows, they lowered him into this lake in Utah where a body was supposed to be buried. So he had his air tanks on, and his suit, and he was going down in this lake, saying, ‘Actually, this is
unbelievably
freezing.’ He really felt it.

When he came out and was back at his hotel, he called me.

‘I have the worst headache. I think it’s a terrible migraine because the water was so cold.’

‘Bloody hell, that doesn’t sound good, Jack. Just go to bed and see how it is in the morning.’

When he woke up the next day, he called again.

‘Mum, I can’t see out of one of my eyes, and my head is still killing me.’

‘You’ve got to see a doctor. Just get on a plane and come home.’

I knew straight away that this wasn’t good. Two years earlier, when he was filming his dad’s documentary,
God Bless Ozzy Osbourne
, and we were all on the road together, he kept saying, ‘Mum, my leg feels weird all the way down to my feet – it’s like pins and needles, but they’re really hot.’

I told him then to see a doctor. I didn’t want to worry him unnecessarily, but back in 1992 I’d done some research into multiple sclerosis when I thought Ozzy might have it. I had even joined a support group. And from what I remembered, what Jack was describing sounded suspiciously familiar.

‘No, Mum. It’s nothing serious. It’s the L4, L5 area on my spine. It’s my bad back, that’s what’s doing it. I’m going to go to my chiropractor.’

That’s what he kept saying. Anyway, this went on for three months and he just learnt to live with it. He never did anything other than go and get his back cracked. So when, two years later, he was talking to the doctor about the migraine and loss of sight, he mentioned the leg problem and, even though MS is very tricky to diagnose because there are so many symptoms, I think that was what pointed them in the right direction.

Jack went to see an eye specialist who said that, in his opinion, it was neurological. So next he went to the neurologist who said he needed an MRI scan. This time I went with him, and sat outside with the technician and his doctor.

I was sitting there, watching the images of Jack’s brain as they popped up on the screen, and the technician pointed to an area showing a couple of white spots.

‘See this?’ he said. ‘Looks like he may have had a stroke.’

He wasn’t a doctor but, of course, these guys are overseeing scans all day long, so they pick things up along the way.

This scared the shit out of me because, until then, I had associated strokes with older people, not fit young men like Jack. But I did know that if you’ve had a couple of small, imperceptible strokes, it can mean that there’s a much bigger, more damaging one on the way, particularly if, like Jack so often did in his work, you were doing something that involved a lot of physical exertion.

Jack’s GP, who was sitting beside me, put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Now hold on a minute. We don’t know anything yet, Sharon,’ he said. ‘Don’t panic. It could be a multitude of things. Just calm down. This is the first of many tests he’s going to have before we can form an opinion.’ And, yes, one of the possible diagnoses was MS.

They admitted him to Cedars-Sinai, and for his eye he was put on an intravenous drip of steroids over three days.

Ozzy was in England, writing with Tony, and I deliberated about whether I should tell him because it still wasn’t definite and I knew it would upset him terribly. But Jack is his son too, and in the end I felt he had to know what the scan had shown. He was devastated. Both me and Ozzy have had a life, but our son’s was just beginning.

Jack stayed in that night, then the next day he was given a lumbar puncture. Then it was a case of, Go home and come back in four days for the results.

That was a very emotional week. Ozzy was still away, so I was home alone, trying to stay strong one minute then bursting into tears the next. As for sleeping, forget it. I managed to remain calm when I spoke to Jack on the phone, because I didn’t want to burden him further. He was very on edge, not just about the stress of waiting for the results, but because he had a new baby and a wife who’d just given birth. And all the time he was thinking, Oh God, am I even going to be able to walk for much longer?

Everyone’s symptoms are different. Some people can’t talk, and there was Jack, practically blind in one eye and with a tingling, burning sensation in his legs. He said he felt like boiling water had been poured over them.

After a couple of days, I spoke with the specialist on the phone who said that, having looked at the scans, he was almost sure it was going to be MS. It was just a case of waiting for the tests on the spinal fluid to confirm it.

Lisa was going with him to get the results. But Jack wanted me there as well. We tend to forget that he is still so young – only twenty-six. But I decided I couldn’t. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it together. And how would it help Jack if I broke down? So I called Ozzy at Tony’s studio in Solihull. There are times when a boy needs his father, and this was one of them.

‘You have to come back, Ozzy,’ I said. ‘There’s no way I can do this.’

So he did, and Ozzy, Jack and Lisa went into the appointment to be told it was one hundred per cent certain that he had MS. Four months later, we did go for a second opinion, just to be sure. But Jack knew; we all knew.

After the diagnosis, Jack and Lisa went straight home and Ozzy came back to Hidden Hills, where we both cried long into the night. Ozzy had kept so strong during the appointment, but back at home he kept saying, ‘If I could take the MS for him, I would.’ You don’t want a twenty-six-year-old to have that and, at the time, Jack’s eye was still very bad. When he spoke to you, you could see his eye trying to focus. He unconsciously developed an eye-half-closed technique; either that, or he would cup his eye completely.

If anything happens to you, you cope with it. But when it’s one of your children, you just can’t get your head around it. Both Ozzy and I felt so helpless. Our son’s adult life was only just beginning and his baby daughter wasn’t yet a month old. I was very fortunate in that I had a good friend, Nancy Davis, who knew a great deal about MS. She has had the disease herself for over twenty years, and coming from a very wealthy family she has one of the biggest foundations in America, putting fortunes into raising money and awareness for MS research. So the first person I reached out to was her.

She said to me, ‘I was in bed for five months – I couldn’t walk, couldn’t feel anything past my waist for that entire time. Nothing. Then I woke up one day,
could
feel my legs, so got out of bed and started to walk.’

In other words, it has no pattern; there is no rhythm.

And now, via her foundation, Nancy has been instrumental in getting seven of the nine drugs licensed that are in use today. She’s an incredible woman; an inspiration to me and to so many others.

So there
is
hope, but meanwhile Jack lives with the time bomb of thinking it’s the MS flaring up every time he gets a headache or a tingling feeling in one of his legs. When he was first diagnosed, he was very, very angry. It was, ‘Why me?’ the most natural thing in the world to feel. Then, after a couple of days, the tears came.

How you get MS is still a mystery. Inevitably, Jack began to question himself: all those expeditions to far-flung corners of the world. Had he picked something up? Was it this, was it that? They don’t know if it runs in families, and they say probably not, but that didn’t stop me from thinking, Oh my God, it’s something he’s got from me.

That’s why research is so important, because so little is known about the disease. Millions of people worldwide suffer from it, women more than men. They used to say that it was an old people’s thing. But it isn’t. It’s simply because it was so hard to spot that people would go for years without being diagnosed.

We recently held a big fundraiser in New York with Nancy – the one where Elton played for us for over an hour. Jack kept saying to Kelly and me, ‘Please don’t cry,’ because it sets him off too, but it’s hard not to weaken and sob. There was a seminar the next day, with leading doctors from around the world. They’ll tell you the headway they’re making, the headway they’re not making – and so it’s really informative. And there were MS sufferers there who were blind, in wheelchairs, people who couldn’t talk properly. And while I admired their courage enormously, all I kept thinking about was my darling son, and maybe having to deal with that one day.

Jack’s eye is a lot better now. He has about seventy-five per cent vision and can see certain colours. But that’s probably as good as it’s going to get, because multiple sclerosis leaves its scars in your body – that’s what the name means. Your body will never go back to being a hundred per cent, because you’re scarred. The main problem he gets at the moment is numbness and tingling in his legs, though I will never know how much because he rarely complains. He says it’s not painful, it’s just weird. He describes it as feeling like having warm water trickle down your legs.

He’s on medication and injects himself every day. That
is
painful, because the formula is thick, so it takes a long time to inject and leaves inflamed welts on his body. One day he does it in the left leg, then the right leg the next day, then the stomach, and so on. He has to rotate.

The one thing that’s certain, following an MS diagnosis, is that you have to do a life change, which includes diet. You have to avoid colds or flu. You shouldn’t drink alcohol, though this wasn’t an issue for Jack. Now when Jack goes on a plane, he has to sanitise the remote control. You have to be very aware. A virus that a healthy person could shrug off, for him could develop into pneumonia.

Astonishingly, he has remained relentlessly positive, keeping fit and eating well, giving his body the best chance it can have of thwarting the onset of the damn disease. If worse symptoms develop, I’m sure he will find ways to cope with them, because he’s such a fighter.

For me, I rationalise his MS in my head by thinking, There’s a reason for everything. And maybe if you have it, you’ve been given it because you’re strong enough and you can help others. And maybe, in some tiny little way, you can help other people, and maybe help find out how this wretched thing comes and how you get rid of it.

In the months leading up to Jack’s diagnosis, I was back on NBC for
America’s Got Talent
. It was in its seventh season.

I absolutely loved it. Not only is it a massive hit show in the States, it’s also got a great premise – it’s good, clean family entertainment and fun to work on. So I was having a ball doing it. Everything was good.

One day early in 2012, a couple of months before Pearl was born, Jack had had a call from his agent: NBC had been in touch. They were offering him a new show, called
Stars Earn Stripes
, where Special Forces people were pitted against celebrities to see if the celebrity could keep up. They had immediately thought of Jack.

So Jack goes in for a meeting and they fall in love with him, as most people do when they meet my wonderfully straightforward son. He’s a regular, nice young man, so it’s not hard to like him. Jack was really excited by this project. It could have been tailor-made for him, and he went through all the extreme sports he’d done, all of which had required extensive training and super-fitness, not to mention nerve. The meeting ended with them saying, ‘Yes, we definitely want you.’

They explained that the show would be slotted into the programming of the London Olympics later in the summer. He was the first person they cast, and he was over the moon because it was so obviously perfect for him.

The contract arrived and, as is usual with these things, it went back and forth between Jack’s lawyers and NBC’s while clauses were tweaked. It was in the middle of these negotiations that Jack was diagnosed with MS. By then he had already had the medical for the show, which he’d passed without a hitch. But that was only for standard things like heart, lungs and blood pressure. It was never intended to pick up on something like MS. But once he had the diagnosis, Jack decided to come clean about it. We hadn’t spoken publicly at that point, but Jack’s agent did the right thing and informed the producers of the show.

A couple of days later, Meredith Ahr, executive vice president at NBC, called me at home. I’d known her for six years, ever since I started on
America’s Got Talent
. When I saw her name come up, I felt my heart flip. It was like, ‘OK, here we go. Here’s the call to fire him.’ But no.