It was around this same time that I started to have trouble breathing. It developed over time, but then it got serious and eventually there were moments when I was gasping for air. I’d run pretty regularly in my college years, and I kept it up as I got older, running four, five, six miles a day, and maybe lifting some weights as well. It was important for me to burn off some of the stress of the investigation. But as weeks passed I’d noticed that I couldn’t keep it up the way I’d always been able to before. I’d get not just winded, but wasted, like I had nothing left. I figured it had to be the stress. It was hard out there, getting it from everybody. I kept going, and it just got worse and worse, to the point where, when the weather warmed up, I couldn’t keep up with my little kids when we were playing whiffle ball on the beach on a rare day off. At night, I kept waking up with cold sweats. I’d be drenched and shaking. And after a few months of this, I woke up one morning and my ankles were all swollen up. I thought—that can’t be stress, can it?
Marguerite made me go to the doctor.
So I went to my doctor, Jack Kelly, and told him what was going on. I don’t know what he was thinking, but he had an X-ray taken of my chest. After it was developed, Dr. Kelly looked it over with me, but he didn’t say anything. He said he’d like the pulmonologist to see it. But rather than have me take it to him—he was just upstairs—he took it up himself. I waited there for a while, getting a little nervous. When Dr. Kelly returned, he asked me into his office, sat me down, and said I had lung cancer.
That was pretty terrifying. That was a Thursday. I took Friday off, and I stayed home with my family that weekend. On Monday, Dr. Kelly had arranged for me to be seen at Dana Farber, and I went over there for some more tests, and other pulmonologists reviewed my X-ray and determined that I didn’t have lung cancer at all, but a rare disease that can look a lot like lung cancer. It’s called sarcoidosis. It’s caused by an antigen—a tiny pathogen that causes the immune system to overreact. It gets into the lungs and stays there, wreaking havoc in your body.
“So it’s not stress?” I asked.
“It can be stressful, and it may be compounded by stress, but it is not caused by stress,” the pulmonologist told me. “Why, are you under stress now?”
“A little,” I said.
“A difficult investigation?” he asked. He’d seen on my chart that I was with the State Police.
“You could say that.” I looked up at him. As the pulmonologist explained it, no one knew what caused the disease, but there were certain things to look for, chiefly some form of pollution, usually in the air. He asked me if I had been in any really dingy, stinking places in the last few months. And I told him I had—in Springfield on a matter entirely separate from the Bulger case. A gang had created a kind of headquarters in the gym of a high school that had been abandoned after a sewer pipe had broken and flooded the gym with raw sewage. On the walls, the stains went twenty feet up. It was the beginning of December, just as we were gearing up for the arrests. Our job was to wire the place for sight and sound, since it wasn’t visible from the outside, and we hadn’t been able to develop any informants. It wasn’t easy drilling holes into the concrete walls for the surveillance equipment. I must have been in there three or four days. And the place really stank. Everything stank—the walls, the air. It was like the Whitey case. There wasn’t a clean thing in it.
The doctor figured that was probably it, but we would never know for sure. He gave me some medication to help with the breathing. He told me the swelling would probably go down on its own. In the meantime, he told me I should do my best to ease off.
“That a possibility?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Well, go as slow as you can,” he said.
Right. My breathing problem got a little better, perhaps from relief that it wasn’t due to anything worse. But one other concern rose up to take its place—that I had to keep quiet about my condition. If people wanted to get me off the case, all they had to do was say I had a health condition and I’d be gone in the morning. So the word was that I was absolutely fine.