4. Chapter Four
Chapter Four
Jane
D ear God, my brain-drain had me on the verge of turning into the Wicked Witch of the East. I was wound so tightly, it was all I could do not to bite anyone’s head off for asking something as trivial as the time of day. I’d spent the past three weeks in a quagmire of hell, leading the Philly team and working around the clock as we all but summoned miracles to keep Hydroade from dropping us and moving their business to the competition. Curt’s warning that the customer was out for blood had been an understatement. With their every demand, my people jumped through miniscule hoops, performing feats of greatness, only to be met with yet another outrageous request.
The problem was they’d all but incinerated our contract and we were dangling over the abyss of Mount Doom, about to turn to ash.
I personally interviewed the thirty-two employees who had come in contact with the contaminated bottle with no success. I met with the police and attorneys (ours and theirs). All the while Hydroade kept ramping up their mandates. The last one? Fire all thirty-two hard-working employees. And my idiot boss Leon actually told the CEO of Hydroade I’d take care of the mass termination without discussing it with me first. They were all good employees. One who worked in maintenance was a single father and could fix anything. Another was a single mother who took extra shifts to feed her kids. Leon didn’t care, but I cared, God dammit.
If only I’d shirked my duty, taken my well-earned vacation, and gone on the cruise with Meg, my limbs might not be dragging as if I’d been put on a medieval rack and stretched to within an inch of my life.
In desperate need of a break, I flew home for the Fourth of July weekend. Today was the first full day I’d had to myself in what felt like forever. Though I’d worked out every morning in the hotel fitness room, my muscles were weighed down like they’d coagulated into lard. When I wasn’t in “firefighting” mode at work, I usually arranged my schedule so I could be home on Wednesday and Thursday nights for advanced karate classes.
But tonight I called my sparring partner Renee to meet me at the dojo for a real workout. The studio was in a strip-mall and was long and spacious. One wall was lined with mirrors and there were six seven-foot punching bags at the far end. I was about halfway into my warmup when Renee pushed through the door with a grin. She was a good six inches taller and had two teenage daughters who were naturals.
“Where are the girls?” I watched her in the mirrors, both of us dressed in black gis and pants with our prized black belts knotted around our waists.
Renee joined me on the mat, jogging around the circumference. “Are you kidding? Ever since Molly got her driver’s license, they’re always out with their friends on Saturday nights.”
Molly was the youngest. “When did she turn sixteen?” I asked, throwing a roundhouse at a punching bag.
“Whoa, you really have been burning the candle at both ends.” Renee ran to the center of the mat and did a few jumping jacks. “Her birthday was a month ago.”
I made a mental note to order a belated gift card. Renee was a single mom and worked for the post office, so I tried to remember her daughters’ birthdays. We’d started taking karate classes about the same time, and we were fairly close in age, so we were always paired together…
Okay, I was eighteen years older but that’s nothing when you’re an adult (if only I really believed that).
When I was a white belt, I jumped into the sparring ring with a green belt who was about twenty and a good fifty pounds heavier than me. It only took one strike and I went down with a concussion—not just a concussion. One little bop on top of my noggin and I was out cold.
I awoke in an ambulance with a screaming headache throbbing at the back of my head. Needless to say, I wasn’t happy—asked the medic to give me some smelling salts and turn me loose. He didn’t listen, but the ER doc did. After shining a light in my eyes, he told me to take some ibuprofen, and sent me home with concussion info.
The doctor did caution me, however. He said that at my age it was best to avoid strikes to the head. My age? I wasn’t old then, and I still don’t consider myself to be even though my hair has turned gray and started falling out. Because I went gray early, I had used the same strawberry-blonde dye for decades. One day my follicles suddenly decided they couldn’t take it any longer. And now it’s only getting thinner. I wear my hair long so I can style it in a bun with a comb-over which hides the thin spots (so embarrassing).
Fortunately, after the concussion incident, my sensei paired me with Renee who is savvy enough to only hit me with light taps. In our discipline, a strike is a strike no matter how hard or soft and, since I started working opposite her, I haven’t had a single concussion.
Renee faced me in the center of the mat. We’d become such a team, neither of us had to utter a sound before we launched into a routine of strikes and kicks.
She parried away my jab. “Your job has you traveling too much, huh?”
I blocked her side kick. She didn’t know the half of it. “It’s been relentless.”
“I have no idea how you cope.”
After we’d gone through our routine twice, we bowed to each other. “Did we cover anything new?” I asked.
She began a series of random strikes, which I parried and blocked. “Nope. Since we’re getting close to the tournament, we’ve been perfecting our forms and sparring.”
We bowed again before turning toward the mirrors. “At least I was able to get up early and practice every morning.”
She stretched her arms before bending over and touching her toes. “You going to be able to make it to the test?” she asked.
“Yep,” I replied, my voice confident, though doubt needled its way under my skin.
Who knew where I’d be in a month? I had terminated the thirty-two souls who had come in contact with the contaminated bottle. Of course, to avoid litigation, we’d given all of them nice severance packages along with placement assistance to help them find new jobs. The problem was we weren’t any closer to finding the real culprit. The police didn’t get anywhere with fingerprints and the film from the security cameras was useless, especially since there were only cameras on the doors. At least that’s what my IT guy said—then I made him give me a flash drive with the footage, not that I had time to watch six months of film.
Renee and I went through our kata form—the one we’d been practicing ever since we’d earned our black belts. Next month we’d be testing for our second-degree, and no matter how much I’d practiced in the hotel fitness room, I hadn’t had the benefit of our sensei’s scrutiny in weeks. I wobbled a bit here and there, not sure why my balance was off. Maybe it was the stress of everything? Who knew? At least I had the moves down.
“How are you doing with the fitness part of the test?” asked Renee.
I eyed her in the mirror. “You would ask that, wouldn’t you?” I glanced back at myself, noting the dark smudges under my eyes and the gray at my temples. Jeez, when did middle age creep up on me?
Renee stood with her feet apart, her hands gripped under her chin. “Let’s go. One hundred and twenty-five squats.”
“Bring it!”
I clenched my fists, willing the goddesses of youth to fill me, and motivating the pair of us by calling out the count of each. These weren’t old-lady squats, these were deep knee bends, making my butt nearly touch the floor. By the time we reached ninety, my thighs burned, I was sucking in air, and the back of my head started pounding like it did whenever a migraine was coming on. I forced myself to keep going. Even though my voice wasn’t nearly as powerful for the last twenty-eight, I got through them. I’d been doing three sets of fifty squats in my workouts, but I was going to have to start forcing myself to do all one hundred twenty-five from now until the tournament.
I shook out my legs, taking a few deep breaths. “You ready for pushups?”
“Thirty?”
We’d earned our black belts with twenty-five but the next level was thirty. In my book the pushups were tough, but not as grueling as the squats. I dropped into the plank position. “One!”
This time, Renee and I called out the count together, but no matter how much prep work I did, at number twenty-two, my arms started shaking, about to give out. The throbbing at the back of my head punished me with a tsunami of a migraine, pounding in my skull with the force of a ball peen hammer.
I gnashed my teeth and bent my elbows for number twenty-eight. Halfway down, my head exploded as if someone had smashed open my skull and started tightening a tourniquet around my brain with an iron wrench.
The room went black.
Ice pulsed through my veins.
Dropping to the mat, I shrieked, “Ow, ow, ow!”
My breathing sped. The torturous, unbearable pressure gripping my skull was as relentless as a boa constrictor’s vise. God save me, I’ve been plagued by migraines my entire life, but this was pain beyond pain, beyond tolerable. Far worse than breaking my hand or tearing my adductor muscle, or having my brother slam the car door on my ankle.
On my belly, I pressed the heels of my shaking hands against my temples. “I can’t see, I can’t see!” I screamed, the pressure so intense, I was positive my gray matter was about to burst out my eardrums.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” I gasped again, my breath coming in short staccato spurts. I blinked over and over. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing my vision to come back.
Now!
“Oh, my God, Jane!” Renee was by my side, her hand on my shoulder. “What happened?”
All I could do was suck in air, staring at the mat and seeing only blackness while a cold chill snaked up my spine. What the hell was happening?
“Are you all right?”
I wasn’t anything close to being all right. I was in the most excruciating pain I’ve ever experienced in my life and I still couldn’t see. I clenched my fists and shuddered. What if I ended up blind forever?
“Give me a minute,” I finally said, rolling to my back.
As suddenly as the blindness had come on, my vision returned, the experience surreal, as if someone drew open the curtains in a theater. The halogens above glared, contrasting hazily with the black ceiling.
Renee kneeled over me, her eyes enormous and filled with worry. She pointed to her phone which was safely stowed by the mirrors. “Should I call an ambulance?”
I blinked, slower this time. The pounding in my head eased a bit. I might have been pretty damned dazed, but I was confident that my vision was as clear now as it had been before I collapsed—at least it was close.
No ambulance. No way! “I think I’m okay.”
The last time I ended up in an ambulance had been an utter waste of time. On top of that, about ten years ago I’d had a similar sudden, screaming migraine and went to the ER where they didn’t even bother to draw blood. They gave me Benadryl and Tylenol and a printout about migraines (yet again). I swear, going to a doctor about thunderous, screaming head pain was totally useless. They’d take one look at me, mumble under their breath that it was a typical woman who complained about every little ache and pain, then they’d roll their elitist eyeballs and tell me I was imagining things.
“Seriously?” She gawked at me as if I were delirious. “I’ve never seen anybody go down like that. What exactly happened to you? ”
I tried to sit up but when the room began to spin, I eased myself back to the mat. “The mother of all migraines came on.” God, my words garbled like a drunk. “Suddenly I felt like someone had tied a tourniquet around my brain and was cranking it so tight it made me go blind.”
She patted my knee. “Whoa, that’s scary. You should go to the doctor, lady.”
It was late. It was also the eve of a holiday. The emergency rooms across Denver were probably all filled with kids who’d been mishandling firecrackers. I made myself sit up, still a bit woozy, the room rocking like a ship at sea.
My gaze shifted back to the ceiling. “I don’t know…” Jeez, I hardly recognized my voice.
“You want me to drive you?”
After spending the past few weeks in hell, I just couldn’t deal with going into a hospital and having some resident treat me as if I’d imagined everything. “Nah, I’ll be okay in a minute.”
“What do you mean you didn’t go to the doctor?” Meg shrieked over the phone.
I shouldn’t have told her about the incident Saturday night, but I’d mentioned it because this was Monday and I still felt dazed. And though I was no stranger to headaches, I’d never completely gone blind before. “You know I have an aversion to doctors.”
I did. Medical practitioners were always so belittling.
“Yeah, but this is different. You said you collapsed. You said you went blind for about a minute. That’s not normal, Mom.”
I put the kettle on to make a cup of tea. It was nine o’clock in the morning and I was still wearing my nightie—very unlike me. “Maybe it’s just all the stress at work.”
“I’m sure it is, but you have the day off, right?” Meg asked. “You need to go to urgent care.”
Ugh!
I loathed doctor appointments. Did everyone else leave their doctor’s offices feeling as if they had not been heard? Maybe misdiagnosed if not undiagnosed? Possibly judged ?
In my experience, it never failed when, after being ushered into an exam room and explaining the reason for my visit, a pronounced furrow would form in the doctor’s brow and he or she would regard me with a quizzical expression as if I had to be insane. Either that, or I might have been inept at describing the reason for my visit because, time after time, I left their hallowed offices feeling foolish as if those well-educated practitioners of medicine considered me to be a hypochondriac.
Which I most certainly was not.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I do have today off since Independence Day was Sunday, but I need to fly out tomorrow.”
“So what? You have to be seen. Should I catch a plane to Denver and drag you to the ER?”
I sighed. Meg could be so emotional at times. “No.”
“Then promise me you’ll at least go to urgent care.”
I pulled off the lid from the canister of English breakfast tea. “I don’t—”
“Promise me!” she demanded.
“Okay, I’ll go.” Then they’ll tell me nothing is wrong and I’ll leave gulping back my bruised pride .
“I’ll be calling you tonight and I want to know the results.”
I barely made it in the door of my executive town house when my phone buzzed with a call from my daughter. I answered and tossed my purse on the white leather couch. “Hi, Meg, it’s not evening yet.”
“Please tell me you went to urgent care.”
“Total waste of effort.” Dear God, how many times did I need to be told I suffered from migraines? “The doctor at the urgent care sent me to the ER where they did a CT of my head followed by an MRI of my head, and then pronounced me perfectly fine…aside from a touch of double vision.”
“You didn’t tell me about the double vision!”
I dropped onto the couch and reached for my Yorkshire Terrier tapestry pillow, clutching it across my stomach. I’d really like to have a dog, but with my hours, pets were out of the question. Jeez, I couldn’t even keep a potted plant alive.
“I swear the doctor had two pointer fingers on his right hand. But he was adamant he only had one.” Honestly, he moved his finger all around the room as if I might see the damned finger more clearly if I looked at it from different angles.
“They didn’t find anything with all those tests?”
I set the pillow beside me. “Nope. They said if I had a TIA or something, there was no sign of it by the time I went in.”
“You should have gone in immediately.”
That’s what they told me at the hospital.
“I don’t think it’s normal to go blind from a migraine,” Meg added.
I didn’t think so either, which is why I agreed to be seen, but what did I know? I wasn’t a doctor. Moreover, I had no time to be sick right now. If I’d had a stroke, it would have been an unmitigated disaster. “Well, at least they didn’t find anything, so I’m clear to fly to Philly tomorrow morning.”
“Philly again? Why is that plant so awful?”
I could go on about the tampering incident and Hydroade’s outlandish demands, or the fact that we had a multi-million-dollar contract on the chopping block and everyone involved was cosmically stressed. Top that off with a new union takeover (very poorly timed if you ask me), and I’d never been in this much shit in my life.
“You know Philly,” I said in my sweetest voice, looking at the Yorkshire Terrier on my pillow which now seemed to have four eyes. My head pounded and, even though I hadn’t gone on the cruise, the room would not stop swaying from port to starboard. “It’s my Achilles’ heel.”