About Alix illnesses. It´s long but i think it´s interesting. It´s from Purple Secret, genes, madness and the royal Houses of Europe"
O, if you knew, how hard Mama´s illness is four us to bear..- Grand Duchess Tatiana to Grigory Rasputin.
As Nicholas II later recorded in his diary, even as a young girl she was easily tired and the victim of various unaccountable pains. Her condition took a distinct turn for worse in 1892, when she was just twenty, on the sudden death of her beloved father the Grand Duke. The shock of his death and anxiety about her own and her young brother´s future brought her to the edge of a nervous breakdown and she had to be sent to the spa Bad Schwalbach in the Taunus Mountains. After the death of her father, she developed "sciatica" with severe pain in the back and legs wich returned at intervals throughout the next ten years or so.
Queen Victoria sent the Tsarevich the doctor´s report according to which Alicky "requires great quiet and rest...and also a strict regime of life as well as diet".
Soon after their marriage, Nicholas was complaining that his wife was spending a great deal of her time in bed and living in seclusion, unable to come down for meals. In these early years, visitors were shocked by the nervous condition of the Empress, who seemed to experience physical pain whenever she met anyone she did not know well. Count Alexei Ignatyev recorded in his memoirs that: "I noticed that her face had become covered with unattractive red blotches". Prince Volkonsky said about her: "Painfully shy, could only squeeze a word out with difficulty, her face becoming suffused with red blotches.
Such red skin blotches, have come to recognize as a symptom of variegate porphyria, the granddaughter of Dr. Botkin tell that the fact that Empress and Anna Anderson manifested red skin blotches, played a key part in convincing her family that Anna Anderson was who she claimed to be, the lost Grand Duchess Anastasia.
The sciatica and weakness of the legs which had come on before her marriage continued to be a major problem throughout her reign, becoming worse with time and making walking a torment.In the final years of her life she was barely able to walk at all.
It is important to note that she was capable when it was required of her of heroic efforts to attend her sick child, visit hospitals with her daugthers and assist the wounded soldiers returning from the front.
In 1909 the Tzar wrote to his mother:"Alix...is feeling better these days...It is very important for her to get better, for her own sake and the children´s and mine. I am completely run down mentally by worrying over her health".
Alexandra suffered from pain not only in the legs and back, she continued to complain of headaches and neck and chest pains, swollen feet and painful teeth, which her dentist at times needed to treat daily or even several times a day.. From 1908 onwards she put on weight and seemed to have aged prematurely, she felt herself growing weaker not only physically but emotionally too.
She became addicted to Veronal, a sedative drug based on barbituric acid once admitting. Nicotine was another false friend to whom she turned in desperation. "I came home and then i couldn´t stand it, i burst into tears, prayed, lay down and smoked to set myself right."
Did this granddaughter of Queen Victoria´s have variegate porphuria, too, like her Aunt Vicky, her cousin Charlotte, and her niece Feodora? Was that inherited metobolic disorder the cause of the terrible suffering which overshadowed her life and that of her husband and children in the final doomed decades of the Romanov empire?
Many of the symptoms which began to show themselves soon after her twentieth birthday are certainly consistent with such a diagnosis: the pain in her legas and back, her lameness, the neuralgia in her face, neck and eyes, the abdominal pain, her shortness of breath and blue lips, her racing pulse and palpitations, the periodic outbreak of red blotches on her face, neck, arms and hands, her hypersensitivity to sound, and her evident mental and emotional disturbance.
Clearly, though the balance of probabilities must be that she had indeed inherited that faulty gene in addition to the gene for haemophilia, more hard evidence is needed even in her case to arrive at a firm diagnosis.
