“My ovaries became the center of my universe,” she wrote, and it’s with an incredible sense of irony that we can think about this statement now. We know that, within five years from that image of exhaustedly buoyant Radner skidding to that bedside with a little ovulation kit, she would be dead from ovarian cancer. As many nights as she lay awake with anxiety about not being able to have a baby, that she worried about her “closed tubes” or the painful cycle of IVF, of whether or not her anxiety was driving her husband up the wall — she never would have suspected those little almond-sized organs, which she was trying to nurture into submission, would take her life.

It was during the filming of the third (and final) film she did with Wilder, in England, that she began experiencing some troubling symptoms: extreme fatigue, bloating, leg weakness. She’d also missed a period. Could it be that, because they had stopped focusing on having a baby and started focusing on the film, that she’d somehow gotten pregnant? She sent her dresser to the local pharmacy to get a couple of pregnancy tests. One, which she took right away (positive) and one that she would take home to do when she was with Wilder. That one was positive, too, and Wilder put the little blue stick in his pocket as they walked through their neighborhood.

“T he weather was warm and we held on to each other and sang quietly while our brains darted through this new phase of our life. We like to sing the song “Ohio” in harmony when we are happy, mainly because I’ve got the harmony down for the whole song except for one line near the end. I never get it right and that always makes us laugh.”

A few weeks later, as she continued to feel not-so-great but chalking it up to early pregnancy, she began to bleed heavily on set. She assumed she was having a miscarriage and called her doctor, who told her to lie down and rest. She was supposed to shoot a scene in the afternoon where she would mostly be sitting. She told Wilder what was happening and they agreed that she might as well stay onset; they hadn’t told hardly a soul that she’d been pregnant, and they both agreed they needed work, and each other, to get through it.

She bled for two weeks, during which time she recalled also getting a rather terrible flu that had been going around the set. By the time filming wrapped up and they returned to Los Angeles, she was feeling run down but assumed that everything she’d been through was just catching up with her.

One otherwise ordinary Sunday in 1986, she and Wilder were headed to a friend’s to play tennis when she suddenly fell asleep in the car, apropos of nothing. She wrote that it was like “being hypnotized into this deep sleep” and “like a fog rolling in over my brain.”

Wilder recalled the event too — the day in his mind when everything about their life began to unravel: “She said, ‘’I can’t keep my eyes open. I think I’m going to fall asleep.’’ She lay back and looked like she had taken a sleeping pill.”

By the time they arrived for their tennis match, she’d rallied. But she still made a doctor’s appointment. “There was nothing wrong with me,” she recalled them telling her — except that she had some elevated Epstein-Barr virus antibodies, as many people do. Epstein-Barr is the virus that causes mononucleosis, among other fairly common conditions. In the mid-to-late 1980s, Epstein-Barr was also a popular “garbage bag” diagnosis for all kinds of fatigue-related symptoms.

Her internist also suggested that her symptoms could be due to depression. He patted her on the back and told her to relax.

A week or so later, she began running a low-grade fever. She called her doctor who told her not to worry about it. The “weird life” as she called it continued. She would be fine for maybe ten days and then, “seemingly around my menstrual cycle, I would go into this severe fatigue and run a low-grade fever, then I would be okay again.”

She recalled trying to do as much as possible on the days she felt well because she knew that there would be a few days where she’d hardly be able to get out of bed. Then, just when she thought she’d spotted a pattern, it started to strike her seemingly of its own volition. By this time, if she hadn’t been before, she certainly was depressed about her health.

And who wouldn’t be?

But she did wonder what came first: the illness or the depression? Her doctor continued to suggest that she was just “emotional” and prone to worry — that the events of the preceding years, paired with her turning 40, were causing her to become depressed which, in his mind, was, in turn, causing her cache of symptoms.

That spring, she began having pelvic cramping on top of everything else. She went to her gynecologist who assured her that nothing was wrong; it was just “mittelschmerz”, the sensation some women can feel at the time of ovulation. “Now I had Epstein-Barr virus and mittelschmerz,” she wrote, “Fitting diseases for the Queen of Neurosis.”

She and Wilder made their annual trip to the south of France, where they had married, and she noticed that each afternoon she’d need to take a nap. She’d started taking a heap of vitamins, hoping to bolster her immune system, but to no avail. She was dizzy, tired, uncomfortable. She kept running low-grade fevers. Their last night in Paris she got so sick after dinner that Wilder had to call a cab to get them back to their hotel room. She chalked it up to nerves about flying home.

Over the next few months, the grinding fatigue continued as well as a seemingly never-ending plague of stomach and bowel problems. Her doctor said she was probably taking too many vitamins. She saw another doctor who thought her stomach problems were — surprise! — the result of her anxiety and depression.

Then she got a new symptom: aching, gnawing leg pain that started in her upper thighs and spread into her already weak legs. It began slowly, like a dripping, and then progressively got worse and worse. Her doctors told her to take a Tylenol.

Though at this point, there was one doctor who thought doing a pelvic sonogram would be useful, just to “rule out” anything serious. Like cancer. Her ovaries “weren’t exactly in the place where they were supposed to be,” but the doctor told her that wasn’t really a cause for concern. There was some “congestion” in her pelvis, but that didn’t seem too serious either.

“Everything is fine,” they told her, “There is nothing to worry about.”

She took Tylenol. She played tennis. For a while, she began to feel a little better. She wasn’t quite so tired, she wasn’t quite so worn down. But the leg pain got worse, and her doctor gave her a high-dose of anti-inflammatory medication which caused her to have terrible nausea and vomiting. So her doctor gave her medication to reduce the acid in her stomach so that she could take the anti-inflammatory medication.

All of her tests were normal.

But she began to notice a gauntness in her face, and she seemed to be losing weight in her arms. She was losing weight everywhere, and too much. For a woman who had struggled with her weight, who had been bulimic even, to notice that she was getting too thin was quite a realization. The pain, the illness — it couldn’t have been in her head. Or could chronic pain, she wondered, make you lose weight?

She went to see a doctor in Boston who gave her an antidepressant. When she didn’t seem immediately placated, he asked her what she was so afraid of. “I am afraid that it is cancer,” she told him.

He told her to just keep having her blood drawn and to stay in touch with her doctor “so that you can set your mind at ease.”

She went home. She saw a new gynecologist. He did a pelvic exam and told her that she had some scar tissue, but everything else was normal. He told her that she could keep trying for a baby if she wanted to.

She was sick, exhausted, on all kinds of medication — and frankly, recalled having no interest in sex whatsoever, given how lousy she felt every day, and how much pain she was in.

She tried acupuncture. Holistic medicine. She took supplements.

Still, the pain in her legs kept her up at night. She bloated so severely that she really did look pregnant — which must have been such a fantastically cruel reminder of what she had not been able to have.

Her doctor told her she was literally “full of shit” and gave her laxatives. She went back to her holistic practitioner and had a colonic. “I will never forget looking past my swollen stomach at the tube, and the only thing that floated by was a bean sprout,” she wrote, “Just a single bean sprout went by.”