The first thing I remember was my name.
Someone was saying it loudly.
Not calling from across the room.
Not speaking to me in the ordinary way.
He was trying to make sure I could hear him.
"Sergeant Whitcomb."
I wanted to answer.
For a moment, I couldn't make sense of where I was.
There were voices around me.
I could hear movement.
The floor beneath my body was hard.
Then I opened my eyes.
A combat medic was kneeling beside me.
His face was close enough that I could see how carefully he was watching me.
He asked me where I was.
I knew the answer.
Or at least I knew I should know it.
Fort Bragg.
The administrative building.
My office.
I had been going through training schedules with Marisol.
Those facts returned in pieces.
The medic asked what year it was.
I found the question irritating.
Not because he had done anything wrong.
Because I knew what the question meant.
He was checking whether I was alert.
Whether my mind was functioning normally.
Whether the fall had left me confused.
I had asked people similar questions during my own years of service.
I understood the procedure.
I just hated being the person lying on the floor.
I tried to sit up.
It was automatic.
I didn't think about whether it was safe.
I simply wanted to get off the ground.
The medic stopped me.
"Stay down, Sergeant."
I tried to lift my head.
"Don't move."
His voice was firm.
I stopped.
That was when I noticed my hands.
Something was wrong with my fingers.
They felt strange.
Almost distant.
There was a buzzing sensation that I couldn't describe properly.
I tried moving them.
I couldn't feel them the way I expected to.
For the first time that morning, I became truly frightened.
The dizziness had been easy to explain away.
Even the trembling could be blamed on exhaustion.
But my fingers?
I couldn't pretend that was normal.
I looked down at my hands.
They were attached to my arms.
I could see them.
But the sensation wasn't right.
I wanted to ask what was happening.
The medic was already working.
Someone placed a blood pressure cuff around my arm.
I felt the material tighten.
The voices around me became shorter and more serious.
Numbers were being repeated.
Questions were being asked.
I knew enough about emergency medicine to recognize that no one was treating this as an ordinary fainting spell.
I tried to follow everything.
I couldn't.
My thoughts kept slipping away from me.
A question would be asked.
I would begin thinking about an answer.
Then another sensation would interrupt.
The pressure cuff.
The weakness in my legs.
The strange feeling in my fingers.
The floor.
I remember feeling ashamed of how helpless I was.
That sounds ridiculous now.
I had collapsed.
I needed medical attention.
There was nothing shameful about it.
But I had spent so many years measuring myself by what I could endure.
Lying still while other people decided what happened next felt almost unbearable.
I wanted to tell everyone I was fine.
I wasn't fine.
That much was obvious.
Within minutes, I was being moved onto a stretcher.
I remember the straps.
I remember staring upward.
I remember trying to understand how an ordinary morning had turned into an emergency.
Marisol had been sitting across from me.
We had been reviewing schedules.
I had been worrying about getting work completed.
Now someone else was handling everything.
I was being taken to Womack Army Medical Center.
I wasn't walking there.
I wasn't driving myself.
I was lying on a stretcher because my body had stopped cooperating.
That realization frightened me more than I wanted to admit.
At the hospital, everything became difficult to remember in the right order.
I remember bright lights passing above me.
I remember the repeated tightening of a blood pressure cuff.
I remember unfamiliar voices asking questions.
Some of them were easy.
Others required more concentration than I seemed to have available.
A nurse wanted to know when I had last eaten a proper meal.
I tried to think.
The question should have been simple.
Breakfast.
Lunch.
Dinner.
People ate those meals every day.
I had a routine.
I should have known.
Instead, I found myself trying to remember the last time I had actually sat down and eaten enough food.
"I had some toast."
The nurse looked at me.
"When?"
I opened my mouth.
Then I hesitated.
I thought about the morning before.
Had I eaten yesterday?
I remembered coffee.
I remembered moving around the kitchen.
I remembered work.
But I couldn't clearly remember eating.
"Yesterday morning, maybe."
She waited.
"Could have been the day before."
Her expression changed.
She didn't need to lecture me.
I could see what she thought.
I had been taking terrible care of myself.
And for once, I didn't have a convincing explanation.
I wanted to say I had been busy.
That work had been demanding.
That I had intended to eat later.
But none of those things changed the answer.
I couldn't tell a nurse when I had last eaten a proper meal.
I was forty-three.
I had spent two decades working in an organization built around preparation and discipline.
And I couldn't remember whether I had eaten breakfast the previous day.
I stared at the hospital ceiling.
The embarrassment was painful.
But the fear beneath it was worse.
Something was wrong.
Not simply uncomfortable.
Not something I could ignore until the weekend.
Something serious enough that people were checking my heart.
I watched the monitor beside me.
The green line moved across the screen.
I had seen monitors like that before.
I understood what they were measuring.
But I had never paid such close attention to one attached to my own body.
Every sound made me look.
Every movement of the line reminded me that I was there because something had failed.
Blood was taken.
Tests were ordered.
People came and went.
I answered questions as clearly as I could.
I tried to stay calm.
That was the one habit I still understood.
When something went wrong, I gathered information.
I listened.
I waited until I knew what I was dealing with.
The trouble was that the information coming back wasn't reassuring.
My laboratory results showed a dangerous imbalance in the electrolytes my body needed to function properly.
I was also severely dehydrated.
Not a little thirsty.
Not mildly run down.
Severely dehydrated.
The doctor explained that the problems were serious.
My heart rhythm was showing abnormalities.
I needed continuous monitoring.
They were not going to send me home after a bag of fluids and a few hours of rest.
I was being admitted.
The word settled heavily in my mind.
Admitted.
I had gone to work expecting to finish a normal duty day.
Now I needed a hospital bed.
I listened while the physician explained what they knew.
I understood that they still needed to determine what had caused the collapse.
They had identified problems.
But there were questions left unanswered.
I had hoped for a simple explanation.
Something that would allow me to say I had overdone it.
Something that could be corrected quickly.
Instead, I was told that the irregularities in my heart rhythm required careful observation.
I looked at my hands again.
The strange sensation in my fingers had frightened me on the floor.
Now I was thinking about my heart.
I had never been so aware of the things my body did without asking permission.
Breathing.
Circulating blood.
Keeping me conscious.
I had spent years treating those functions as guaranteed.
That afternoon, I understood they weren't.
The doctor was kind.
He was also serious.
He made it clear that having another person in the office when I collapsed had mattered.
I thought immediately of Marisol.
She had seen my condition getting worse.
She had tried to send me for medical attention.
She had been there when I went down.
I had been annoyed with her for insisting I needed help.
Now I understood how wrong I had been.
I looked at the blanket covering my knees.
There was a hospital emblem printed on the fabric.
It seemed easier to stare at that than at the doctor's face.
He explained why remaining under medical supervision was necessary.
I listened.
I answered when he asked whether I understood.
I did.
That was part of the problem.
I understood enough to know that none of this was minor.
When he left, the room felt unusually quiet.
The monitor continued its steady sounds.
The IV line was secured to my arm.
I could feel the tape against my skin.
I wasn't wearing my uniform anymore.
I was a patient.
And I wasn't sure what happened next.
For the first time that day, I allowed myself to think about Graham.
My husband.
The person who should know I was there.
The person who should be told that I had collapsed at work.
I wanted to hear his voice.
I wanted someone familiar to walk through the door.
I had spent the entire day trying to keep my fear under control.
And suddenly, I didn't want to do it alone.
I thought about the coffee I had made that morning.
The sticky note about Thursday's plumber.
Graham sleeping while I dressed for work.
Everything had seemed normal.
It was difficult to believe that only a few hours had passed.
I reached toward the blanket and pulled it higher over my legs.
My body felt exhausted.
I couldn't imagine returning to work.
I couldn't imagine driving home.
I couldn't even imagine standing for very long.
I needed help.
There was no sensible way to deny it.
The Army had taught me how to ask for support during an operation.
It had taught me that people depended on one another.
Yet somewhere in my personal life, I had become accustomed to handling every uncomfortable thing alone.
I hadn't noticed that contradiction until I was lying in a hospital bed.
There was paperwork to complete.
People to notify.
Decisions that would have to be made.
But those things could wait.
I needed my husband to know what had happened.
I thought that once he knew, he would come.
I didn't question that belief.
Not yet.
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: The Nurse Called My Husband From the Cardiac Ward, but Every Hour Without an Answer Forced Me to Make Another Excuse for Him
I Thought Twenty Years in the Army Had Prepared Me for Anything, Until My Body Failed and My Husband Was Nowhere to Be Found
Part 2 of 15
