7. Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
Jane
I f Meg needed me to have a CT scan of my neck, by God, I was going to get one regardless of if I had to cancel “vital” meetings in Philly. I drove to the same urgent care I’d been to a week ago—the one with the doctor who’d sent me to the ER. To my chagrin, that doc wasn’t on shift. When I explained everything that had happened both to me and Meg to the new physician, he sat with his elbow on the desk and his chin in his palm. He stared at me without an inkling of empathy, his expression dull, judgmental, and condescending.
He didn’t need to open his mouth and utter a word. The man had already pegged me as a neurotic, health-obsessed female. Nonetheless, I swallowed my pride and persevered. “My daughter’s neurologist said it is crucial for me to get a CT scan of my neck immediately.”
The man straightened and groaned, shifting his eyes to the wall as if this was the hundredth time he’d heard a woman ask for a needless CAT scan today. “Honestly, I don’t believe it’s necessary. You seem perfectly fine now.”
Mother-effing asshole!
How did he know if I was fine or not? Aside from shaking my hand when he entered, he hadn’t touched me.
I hated.
Abhorred.
Absolutely loathed being judged as a hypochondriac wimp—being gaslighted as if having a vagina made me too dumb to know my own body. As if being a woman put me in a category of patients who were never to be taken seriously.
I’d spent hours reading every credible article and web post I could find about carotid and vertebral dissections. They were absolutely scary and I was not about to take no for an answer. “Please.” I resorted to pleading. “I’m not asking for myself, I’m asking for my daughter who is an inpatient at Gustafsson Hospital in La Crosse, Wisconsin and, as I said, her neurologist insists it’s critical for me to be scanned immediately .” I grabbed my phone and held it up. “We can call them if you’d like.”
After a great deal of hemming and hawing, the man finally agreed. “If it will give you peace of mind…”
By this stage, I’d kiss his feet if he told me that’s what it would take to get the damned test. “Yes. I need peace of mind, thank you.” So did my baby, and if I couldn’t be in Wisconsin holding her hand and making sure the doctors were giving her the proper care, I was going to help in any way I could—screw the eye rolls and my hypochondria paranoia. I absolutely must have the arteries in my goddamned neck looked at.
When I took a moment out of my frenetic schedule to think about it, I still wasn’t back to being my normal self. I’d swallowed as much ibuprofen and acetaminophen as the labels would allow. I was still dizzy and a little nauseated, but I drove myself to the facility where the urgent care sent patients for non-emergency scans. Once I’d checked in, the imaging took about ten minutes, after which I was told the results ought to show up in my patient portal in a few hours.
I headed back to work, where no sooner had I turned on my computer when Leon Worthington slid into my office guest chair, a taut frown etching the deep lines around his mouth. My boss was seriously intense—gray hair, black eyes that never blinked and bored through everyone like a drill. Usually, the man called me on the phone when he wanted to talk. Sometimes he asked me to go up to his office on the top floor. Rarely did he ever come down to mine.
“What’s the latest with Hydroade?” he demanded, crossing his knees, tipping up his square jaw, peppered with a hint of gray whiskers.
“Nothing new.” My butt cheeks clenched. “We still have people at their facility inspecting every bottle as its depalletized even though we’re taking them from the lines to the trucks. The investigation will be ongoing for weeks yet.”
“Then why are you sitting on your ass in Denver?”
I looked at my coffee mug and wondered if it would shatter if I threw it at his head. “I had a doctor appointment I couldn’t miss this morning. I’m flying out tomorrow.”
He tipped the chair back and crossed his arms. “Should I be worried?”
“Of course not.” There was absolutely no way on earth I was going to tell him about collapsing while doing pushups. I wasn’t even going to volunteer Meg’s issues. He expected me to be Superwoman and this was no time to tell him I wasn’t. “It was just routine.”
“You couldn’t reschedule a routine appointment?” He glared at me, narrowing those hawk-like eyes. “Should I put someone else on this?”
Exactly what did he mean? After years of driving unprecedented profits to the bottom line for this company, I wasn’t allowed a few minutes to go to the doctor? Hell, I was the VP of Operations—in charge of all eight plants. It stung to have Leon insinuate I wasn’t cutting it.
“The situation is contained.” Every fiber of my body tensed as I fought against the urge to explode. “We’ve done everything Hydroade has asked us to do. Believe me, six months from now, this will all be ancient history.”
“If they don’t pull our contract.”
Our gazes collided with an electrically charged moment of unspoken doom. I didn’t breathe. Moreover, I refused to flinch because if I showed an iota of fear, my boss would eat me alive. If there was one thing I’d learned from working for this man all these years, when it came to the business, I never sugarcoated anything with him. “Would you be surprised if they didn’t?” I asked—my way of feeling him out.
“I would.”
I heaved a sigh, making my head spin all the more. “So would I.”
“We lose that contract and we’ll have to close down Philly.”
My butt cramped from the tension, damn him. “I know.”
“We can’t lose Hydroade, Jane.”
We could, though it would require some major restructuring. “I’ve already asked sales to go after Muscle Juice.”
Leon stood and looked out the window—another flock of geese flew past— oh, the irony . “Yeah, but that’s half the volume.”
“It is. That’s why I also told the CFO to run shutdown scenarios for me—top secret of course, but we need to know all of our options before and if Hydroade pulls the pin.”
After Leon left my office, I got on the phone. Making sure I had all my bases covered, I pushed the CFO for his report. I also asked him about the status of filing an insurance claim but he said Leon had that covered—dear God, the man was a total micromanager .
Late afternoon, I discovered I’d missed a text from the patient portal and quickly logged on, expecting my usual clean bill of health. The pulsating rush I’d been having in my ears turned into a pounding boom as if my heart were beating in the back of my neck while I read the CT findings listing normal lymph nodes, salivary glands, thyroid and more. With each normal result, I breathed easier until I got to the middle of the second page:
IMPRESSION:
Beaded appearance of the bilateral cervical ICAs compatible with fibromuscular dysplasia.
Small short segment dissection of the distal right cervical ICA, measuring 4mm in length.
Minimal atheromatous plaque in the proximal right ICA without hemodynamically significant stenosis.
I reread the results, my mouth agape, a tight pinch between my eyebrows. Was something wrong? What the heck was fibromuscular dysplasia? Holy Pete, I’d never seen terms like atheromatous or hemodynamically significant .
I Googled everything.
First of all, I should have realized ICA stood for internal carotid artery. But the rest was nothing with which I was familiar.
The Moya Clinic’s website reported: “ Fibromuscular dysplasia is a condition that causes narrowing (stenosis) and enlargement (aneurysm) of the medium-sized arteries in your body. Narrowed arteries can reduce blood flow and affect the function of your organs. Fibromuscular dysplasia appears most commonly in the arteries leading to the kidneys and brain. Fibromuscular dysplasia can affect other arteries, including those leading to your legs, heart, abdomen and, rarely, the arms. It's possible to have more than one affected artery. Treatments are available, but there isn't a cure...”
Toward the top of my search was a website called the Fibromuscular Dysplasia Society of America. I clicked on the symptoms and signs, some of which I didn’t have, but headaches, dizziness, and a whooshing sound in my ears were all things I lived with on a daily basis.
I couldn’t believe what I was reading aside from the good news that I did not have significant narrowing of the neck arteries… yet . Evidently, I did dissect my right carotid when I was doing pushups.
There was no follow-up communication from the urgent care doc who’d ordered the test, so I emailed a copy to my GP and one to Meg as I was dialing her phone.
She answered on the first ring. “Hi, Mom.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Not sure. They’re now basically saying that nothing’s wrong with me and I’m waiting for the nurse to remove my IV so I can go home.”
“ Nothing’s wrong?” I was on the verge of spitting my teeth across the room. “But you had two dissections!”
“I know. It’s okay. They said there’s no reason to keep me in the hospital—just told me not to do anything too strenuous for a while. Frankly, I’m relieved because I can’t get any sleep in this place.”
Dammit, I should have gotten on a flight to La Crosse. My baby needed an advocate. “Are you okay to go home alone?”
“Yeah, I might be a little dazed, but I’ll be fine. Besides, I have a follow-up appointment with neurology.”
I could relate to her use of the word dazed. Heck, I was still woozy. “Will you be seeing the neurologist who wanted me to get the CT scan?”
“Uh huh—that’s the one…um…were you able to get your neck looked at?”
“I was.” Maybe I should have started with that. “I just received the results—not sure what it all means, but I did have a dissection. The report also says my carotids have a beaded appearance, compatible with something called fibromuscular dysplasia.”
“Fibro-what?”
“I emailed you the report. Show it to your doctor.”
“Okay. God, Mom, it’s really weird that we both had dissections one week apart.”
That was an understatement. “Scary weird.”
After printing the radiology report, I called my GP’s office. She never had openings on the spur of the moment, but I didn’t give a damn because I sure wasn’t going back to urgent care and that son-of-a-bitch who belittled me like I was important as a gnat.
Initially, the receptionist put me on hold, making me suffer that godawful synthesizer music in frequencies that rattle your brain. Drumming my fingers, I amped up my fighting spirit. I swear, if she tried to tell me I couldn’t be seen for a month, I’d go over her head.
Somehow . It was never easy to sidestep a doctor’s receptionist.
“Ms. Corley?” said the woman as the hold music cut out.
All right. I breathed in, ready to plead my case. After all, this didn’t only concern me. “Yes?”
“The nurse is hand-delivering your report to Dr. Panda. How soon can you come in?”
I blinked.
I didn’t need to be assertive? This was new, except I wasn’t exactly filled with joy—not because she didn’t kick back, but because I sensed urgency in the receptionist’s tone. “As soon as possible. Five minutes?”
“The nurse said to come when you can and we’ll find a way to squeeze you in.”
Once I arrived at the clinic, I sat in the brightly lit waiting room with its familiar paintings of the Front Range and pictures of The Rockies’ peaks.
Only a few minutes passed before the nurse took me back to an exam room, checked my vitals, asked the standard questions, and then I waited about half an hour for Dr. Panda to come in. She was about four-foot-ten, had long black hair and was a tad unconventional. She was the only doctor I’d ever been to who used acupuncture needles to loosen tight muscles. “Jane, how did you dissect?”
“Pushups—number twenty-eight. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to thirty.”
She had a printed copy of my report and flipped through it. “Hmm. FMD?”
“Have you heard of it?”
She put her stethoscope in her ears and pressed it against my chest. “It’s on the list of rare diseases. I’m going to refer you to a vascular.”
“Another doctor? Ugh.”
Urging me to sit forward, she listened to me take a few breaths. “It might take a few weeks to be seen, so make an appointment today, okay?”
If I had more time, I would have complained about the fact that urgent care hadn’t even bothered to contact me, but I just gave a nod. “All right. Anything else? I need to head back to the office.”
“Are you still taking your cholesterol meds?”
“Yes, of course. ”
“Good.” She draped the stethoscope around her neck and started typing on the computer’s keyboard. “I’m sending you to Dr. Vaughn upstairs. You ought to pop up there now and make an appointment.”
I checked my watch. I had a meeting with HR in an hour. “All right.”
She held a very pointy finger under my nose. “And don’t push yourself too hard when you exercise. I’m sure no one needs to tell you what happens when a dissection actually ruptures through the outer artery wall.”
I gulped. All my life I’d tried to stay in shape. Who got dissected arteries when they did pushups? I’d never even heard of dissections before Meg called. Why had it happened to me? And Meg wasn’t even in a real accident. Why did hard braking nearly kill my precious baby?
Filled with questions, I walked past the elevator and took the stairs up to Dr. Vaughn’s office, who happened to be the only vascular surgeon in the building.
However, the greeting I received was far frostier than the one downstairs. No matter how fiercely I tried to argue, the receptionist said the earliest appointment was in two weeks and I ought to be thankful to be getting in that early.
My mind boggled at the inconsistencies in the medical profession. When I’d walked into Dr. Panda’s office, it seemed as if my situation was akin to a medical emergency—but the vascular specialist’s receptionist didn’t seem to believe so. Her nonchalance was almost a relief because I didn’t have the luxury to worry about my health at the moment. Curt and I had to meet with Hydroade in Pennsylvania tomorrow. I’d already wasted enough time.