My Unnerving Insight Into JFK’s Hidden Struggle

The strange, intimate parallel between JFK’s hidden struggle and my own

For the last few years, JFK has haunted me. Not in a dramatic way, not like a ghost appearing at the foot of my bed, but in small, strange moments. In every emergency room I’ve been admitted to. Every IV threaded into my arm. Every doctor flipping through my chart, pausing, frowning slightly at the words adrenal insufficiency. And then, inevitably, they say it. “Oh, you have adrenal disease? That’s rare. You know who else had it? JFK.”

The first few times, I laughed politely, even though inside I was irritated. Why would I want to be compared to a president? I wasn’t powerful or important or historic. I wasn’t a symbol of anything. I was just tired. Bone-tired. Soul-tired. Tired of my body breaking down, tired of explaining what was happening inside me. I didn’t feel brave or glamorous or presidential. I felt small. Fragile. Like something delicate left too long in the sun.

But the comparisons kept coming. Nurses. Specialists. Endocrinologists. Even a pharmacist once, scanning my prescriptions and raising an eyebrow. “JFK had Addison’s too, you know.” Eventually, curiosity won. I thought, fine, let me learn about this man everyone keeps tying me to.

They don’t really cover this part of him in Canadian Catholic school. We got the sanitized history: the Camelot myth, the pretty wife, the tragic assassination. We didn’t get the messy details. The pain. The lifelong illness. The endless treatments.

And what I found startled me.

He had been sick nearly his entire life. Not just a little sick. Not the kind of sick you shake off after a few days. Chronic, gnawing, unpredictable sick. The kind that hums beneath everything. The kind that makes your body unreliable. The kind that sits quietly until it doesn’t. Until it takes. Until it breaks.

He wasn’t just a man cut down in his prime. He was a man whose prime was a daily negotiation with his body. A man walking a tightrope between public power and private collapse.

And suddenly, I wasn’t so annoyed by the comparison. Suddenly, I felt something closer to kinship. To understanding. To awe.

Cortisol keeps you alive. It is the hormone your body uses to face stress. Physical stress. Emotional stress. The simple stress of being awake, of standing upright in the world. Without it, every challenge that should be survivable starts to break you down. Without it, the body unravels.

Even as a young man, he was sounding alarms no one wanted to hear. His Harvard thesis, warning that England was unprepared for the coming war, turned into a bestselling book. He had the rare gift, or curse, of seeing disaster before it arrived, of carrying the weight of consequences early, even as his body was already failing him.

John F. Kennedy’s body was unraveling long before the presidency. His first serious diagnosis of Addison’s disease came in 1947, when he was just thirty, after years of mysterious illnesses and collapses that no one could fully explain. The doctors in London told him then that he had a year to live. One year. He lived sixteen more, somehow.

The stories say his skin sometimes turned a strange bronze color, a darkened tan that made him look healthy and vigorous to the public, but it was not a healthy glow. It was one of the visible signs of his failing adrenal glands. The pigmentation was his body’s quiet alarm. The orange skin was not a cosmetic detail, it was a symptom. His body was flagging under the weight of not enough cortisol. His immune system was breaking. His salt balance was failing. His organs were shouting from under the suit.

And still, he worked. He worked while staring down the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He worked while navigating the Bay of Pigs disaster. He worked while sending federal troops to protect Black students in Alabama. Every day under pressure. Every headline. Every meeting where one wrong word could ignite a war. Every negotiation where the stakes were the future of the world.

He had been sick since he was a boy. Scarlet fever nearly killed him when he was three. His childhood was marked by hospital beds and long recoveries. He was thin. Pale. Small. There were always fevers at the edges. His parents sent him to boarding school hoping he would toughen up, but he spent more time in the infirmary than on the playing field. The nurses at Choate knew him by name.

And then, as a young man in the Navy, he was marooned on an island after his boat was struck and sunk by a Japanese destroyer. He swam for miles, pulling an injured crewmate behind him by the strap of the man’s life jacket clenched between his teeth. He hid from enemy patrols. He slept in the jungle. He starved. His already fragile body fought off infections, parasites, and malaria that almost killed him. And he came home from that island even weaker than before, though no one dared call him weak.

I want to explain why this matters to me. Why it feels so strange, like a quiet, invisible thread between us. I have had adrenal crises too. I have felt my body slip out from under me. I have had days when I was not sure I would make it.

When your body runs out of cortisol, you start to die. People call it crashing. But that word is too soft.

What it feels like is this:

It feels like a heavy fog pressing down on you, thick and unrelenting. It feels like gravity has doubled, pulling your body toward the floor. Your legs ache. Your lower back throbs. Then comes the shaking. Sweat pours from your palms. Sweat slicks the soles of your feet. You are hot. You are freezing. You are burning from the inside out. Then comes the dread. A deep, animal dread that whispers: this is it. Your stomach twists itself into knots. You cannot sit. You cannot stand. You fold forward, then backward. The nausea climbs up your throat. You vomit. You cannot stop. Your body purges and purges. You try to speak but the words come out wrong. They slip sideways, too slow or too fast. You cannot hold them. Your blood pressure drops. Your vision narrows to a tunnel. Your heart pounds harder to make up for what is slipping away. Everything feels too much like you can’t bare to exist anymore.

This threat of his body failing him is what he carried into every press conference. Every negotiation. Every flight to Berlin. Every summit with Khrushchev. Every speech that was often improvised. I wonder if he felt it coming on behind the podium. I wonder if he felt it sitting alone in the Oval Office. I wonder if he ever worried he would face a public collapse, that America wouldn’t understand his disease and he would be treated as inferior, misaligned, damaged.

By the end of his life, they were experimenting. Slipping steroids under his skin. Flooding him with hydrocortisone. Mixing cocktails of medications that had never been tested in anyone like him. His body was a battlefield of trial and error, stitched together with injections, pills, patches, secret treatments whispered between doctors. They were trying anything to keep him upright, to keep him smiling for the cameras, to keep him standing beneath the weight of the presidency. It is rumored that at his autopsy, his adrenal glands had shriveled down to nothing, worn thin by years of disease and overcompensation.

And when the bullet finally found him, when history marked his ending in an instant, I wonder what would have happened if it hadn’t. I wonder how many more years his body could have carried him, how many more public appearances he could have endured before something inside him simply gave way. I wonder if the disease had already been quietly claiming him, long before that day in Dallas. He was only president for just over 1000 days.

I do not know how he kept going. I know he was not perfect. But he kept going. And somehow, that makes me believe I can too.