A Curve in the Road(57)

The nurse goes to a phone to make the call, and Jack touches my arm. “You’re not on anything, are you? Any medications? Alcohol? Illicit drugs? I need to know.”

I shake my head.

“Then tell me more about how you felt in the seconds just before you collapsed. Describe the experience to me.”

I pause. “Okay, but first, can you tell me what’s going on with the gallbladder patient? Is he okay?”

“We’ll check on that for you.” Jack makes eye contact with another nurse, who leaves the room.

I take a deep breath and think back to how I felt just before I collapsed.

“I was tired,” I tell him, “but that’s nothing new. Like I said, I’ve been sleeping a lot lately. But then I felt a tingling sensation in my head. I thought it would pass and that I was going to make it through the rest of the surgery, but then the patient’s blood pressure dropped, and alarms started going off. I felt a rush of adrenaline, and that’s when my knees gave out, and I couldn’t hold on to the instruments. My whole body just wilted. It was like all my limbs turned to spaghetti, and that’s why I fell. But like I said, I was conscious the whole time. I was fully aware of everything that was happening in the room. I could hear the resident and the anesthetist taking over, and then I felt myself being lifted onto the gurney. I heard Corinne tell you that I was blinking a lot and that I said my eyes were dry.”

Jack frowns at me. “Was it like . . . an out-of-body experience?”

Of all the doctors I know, only Jack would ask that question.

“No, I was very much inside my body, and my eyes were closed, so I couldn’t actually see anything, and yet I could see it in my mind. It was like I was trapped, and I wanted to break free from the paralysis, but I couldn’t.”

He nods at me. “You say your knees buckled when you felt the panic from the alarms going off?”

“Yes.”

A nurse returns with news about my patient in the OR. “Everything’s fine,” she says. “They’re just closing up now.”

“Thank God.”

Jack glances toward the door to the trauma room and pats my arm. “I’ll be right back. Just stay put, okay?”

Even though I have plenty to do in the hospital and another surgery scheduled in an hour, I don’t put up a fight because all I want to do is sleep. As soon as Jack is gone, I close my eyes and fall into a fitful slumber in which I dream that I’m skiing fast down a snow-covered mountain, unable to slow down because it’s too steep. I’m terrified I’m going to plummet to my death.

Then suddenly I’m being chased by a mugger in a city neighborhood. I dash into an alley, search for a place to hide, but there’s nowhere to conceal myself, so I just keep running, leaping over bags of garbage . . .

Someone touches my shoulder and shakes me hard. I wake with a gasp.

The head of neurology is standing over me, watching me intently. I’m surprised to see him, and I worry that I might have been moaning or talking in my sleep, none of which is terribly professional.

At least this time, I know I was dreaming. I have no illusions that I was actually skiing down a snowy mountain or running from a thief who wanted to hurt me.

I try to sit up, but I feel weak and groggy. “Dr. Tremblay . . . how long was I out?”

“About ten minutes,” he tells me. “How are you feeling now?”

“Rotten,” I reply, leaning up on my elbows. Then I decide it would be best to rest my head on the pillow before adding, “And exhausted. Like my body is made of lead. I’m just so tired.”

He ponders that and nods with understanding. “Dr. Bradley told me what happened. He described your symptoms to me, but I’d like to hear it from you. Can you tell me everything you remember, leading up to the moment you collapsed? And anything else you think is relevant about your health.”

“Of course.” I explain my fainting episode again and the level of awareness I had, along with the strange dreams I’ve had at home over the past few weeks. And my car accident.

Dr. Tremblay listens attentively.

I also mention that I’ve put on a few pounds.

When I’m finished telling him everything, he asks, “Are you aware that you were dreaming just now?”

“Yes. Was I moaning? Or tossing and turning?”

“No, but your eyelids were fluttering. You’ve been in a state of REM since the moment I entered the room.”

He raises an eyebrow, and I understand why he’s telling me this—because we both know it’s not normal to enter the REM phase so quickly after drifting off. It should take anywhere from eighty to a hundred minutes.

“So . . . what do you think is going on?” I ask him, and I feel inadequate because I don’t know the answer myself. I’m a physician. Shouldn’t I know what’s wrong with me?

Dr. Tremblay glances away briefly. “I can’t be absolutely sure without performing some tests,” he says, “but I suspect that what happened to you in the OR just now was cataplexy.”

Cataplexy. I know that disorder, and it’s not something I want to hear.

“What you’ve just told me,” he continues, “about the dreams you’ve been having and your increased fatigue and sleeping during the day is consistent with the condition of—”