IN 1978 Mari Jean Ferguson, then thirty-eight, was diagnosed with hypertension—high blood pressure. She had just given birth to her first child after a difficult pregnancy, during which she had experienced irregular heartbeats and bad respiratory allergies. Her doctors wanted to medicate her for all three conditions, but she refused.
“My then father-in-law was a pharmacologist who had worked for a drug firm,” she says, “and I never took medications without first checking with him. In this case, he told me the drugs they wanted me to take were pretty heavy-duty and advised against them. He told me to wait a year and see what happened. I did continue with allergy shots, which I’d been taking for some time. Allergists had made a lot of money off me since I was a teenager, and being allergic was still my biggest medical problem. By using stress-management techniques and breathing exercises and by controlling my weight I was able to keep my blood pressure in the high-normal range for several years without drugs.”
Mari Jean needed all the help with stress management she could get. Her career was in doubt, since she was up for tenure review as a professor at a prominent midwestern university. Having a child at age thirty-eight was frowned upon by the tenure committee, and eventually she was turned down. Also, her marriage was on the rocks. Following her daughter’s birth her husband became “overtly abusive,” disclaiming responsibility for the child on the grounds that it was not his.
It was Mari Jean’s second marriage. Her first had ended in divorce when her husband fell into a pattern of binge drinking and psychiatric hospitalizations. That was in Berkeley, California, where Mari Jean had earned her Ph.D. in sociology in the late 1960s. She had come a long way from her home in northern Alberta, “where I wasted a lot of time in rebellion against my family. I was into a lot of truancy in high school, went to business college, got married early, and was always doing the wrong thing. My brother was the family hero and got all the approval.” In 1970, her father died of cancer at age sixty, leaving her mother distraught.
When Mari Jean lost her academic job in 1981, she enrolled in a program to become a family therapist and went through therapy herself for two years. “I began to realize how dysfunctional my family had been, and I began to grow, but, ironically, that created more problems in my second marriage, because my husband stayed in place. Then out of the blue, he filed for divorce and cleared out all of the money.”
Another blow came in 1984, when her brother died suddenly of myocarditis, a viral infection of the heart. Her mother, broken-hearted, had a series of strokes that required Mari Jean to make frequent trips to Alberta to care for her until she died in 1986. Mari Jean’s blood pressure crept up until it was no longer manageable without medication; she started on the drugs just before her mother’s death. Mari Jean, who was overweight and smoked cigarettes, now became clinically depressed. She took antidepressant drugs for a time and got back into psychotherapy. In 1989 she moved to Pittsburgh to start a new life, having accepted a job as an associate professor of sociology at a small college.
“I was very overqualified for this place,” she says, “and I knew I didn’t fit in, but I decided to keep my mouth shut and try.” She now came under the medical care of Dr. Amy Stine, who maintained her on a combination of two antihypertensive drugs. “Despite my best intentions, I found myself getting into trouble again,” Mari Jean recalls. “My department chairman is on a vendetta to get rid of me when I come up for contract renewal, and I’ve had to get a lawyer.”
In October 1993, Mari Jean saw Dr. Stine for a checkup. Dr. Stine was surprised to find her patient’s blood pressure way down: 90/60. “You’re over-medicated,” she told her, and eliminated one of the drugs. When Mari Jean visited Dr. Stine again, early in 1994, her pressure was still 90/60. “What are you doing?” Dr. Stine asked. Mari Jean paid little attention. “I’ve learned over the years that most doctors aren’t that interested in you,” she says. Dr. Stine took her off medication completely.
At the next visit, Mari Jean’s blood pressure remained 90/60, an unusually low value. This time Dr. Stine demanded an explanation. “You haven’t lost weight. You haven’t changed your diet. You haven’t stopped smoking. You haven’t increased your activity. You haven’t done any of the things people are supposed to do to get their blood pressure down. What did you do?”
“Do you really want to know?” Mari Jean asked. “I’ll give you the short version. I saw myself repeating the same patterns I’ve done all my life, always putting myself before God, always saying, ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.’ Last fall, for the first time in my life I said, ‘Just let go—let whatever happens happen.’ And that’s it.”
Dr. Stine says she has never seen anything like this case. Mari Jean Ferguson’s blood pressure is still low normal and stable. “I’m awed that my mind alone could do this,” Mari Jean says.