Course Correction (15 page)

But I did find one new friend in the process. David had also fallen for Don when they met their freshman year, but settled for friendship when Don defined the strict boundaries of their relationship. Don was not bisexual, so David had to settle for one-sided flirting and platonic dinners filled with banter about English literature and foreign movies. I appreciated David's biting, sarcastic sense of humor, and his self-deprecation about his situation with Don. We ate our share of meals together, trading tidbits about the guy we had in common, and when Don finally gave me the heave, David was there to comfort me.

Meanwhile, my father and I debated my major. I loved math and was drawn to computer science, but he suggested a novel approach: “Do something that's hard for you, that you're not so good at.” My memories of the red C minuses my freshman English professor had scrawled across the bottom of my papers, along with the oft-appearing directive “see me,” floated at the periphery of my father's counterintuitive advice. A major in English would require lots of writing, but no senior essay. That seemed too easy, so I searched for another major with a heavy writing requirement and a senior essay. History fit the bill, so off I went.

But, really, I majored in rowing. I chose my courses according to its seasons and arranged my classes around practices. I worked out with my teammates and followed Anne Warner's lead without fessing up to any goals beyond gold for the Bulldogs. She'd returned from the Olympics with a bronze medal, but was bitter toward us, as her haughty attitude the previous year had resulted in the large group of irreverent freshmen (five of us who'd rowed with her in the varsity) electing as captain not her, but a top lightweight instead.

Bakehead, who had rowed the previous season in the six seat, was musing about trying out for the 1977 National Team. Anne Boucher (Bouche) had also joined us—our program's first-ever experienced freshman recruit. She came with an illustrious high-school-rowing pedigree and an open interest in climbing the highest rungs of the sport. I could stay safely under the radar and stealthily pursue my private fantasies without having to expose myself at all.

There was only one problem. Okay, maybe not only one, but this one blindsided me.

It shouldn't have, because my asthma had been a fact of life since sixth grade. Back then, a visit to the doctor diagnosed the condition, but in my hardheaded, defiant twelve-year-old way, I decided the guy was wrong.

After all, he claimed his specialty was ears, eyes, noses, and throats, and my problem lay south of my neck, by my estimation well below his geographic expertise. Plus, I couldn't understand how something could be wrong with me when everyone else in my family was A-OK. They all could breathe just fine. After all, we shared the same genes. To top it all off, he blamed my cats for making me sick. Those sleek, dark-brown companions with long, wavy tails—our pair of Burmese,
Chocolate and Vanilla, were my biggest fans. They showed up at the front door every afternoon when I returned from school and followed me everywhere until bedtime. I had slept with them nightly for eons, surrounded and protected. There was no way my cats were the problem.

The facts, however, were hard to dispute. My skin broke out in itchy blotches wherever Chocolate rubbed against me. Accidental scratches turned into jagged red lightning bolts and then swelled into angry welts. Sometimes when he slept snuggled up beside me on my pillow, I felt as if something was hugging me to death from the inside, squeezing all the air out of my lungs. I couldn't figure out how to grab hold of it, shake it loose, and throw it out of there.

In addition to cats, several other life essentials found their way onto the list of dangers: dogs, horses, hay, grass, chocolate, dust. Show me a place on earth without dust. I couldn't go anywhere without being threatened by my environment.

Part of my punishment required trekking to Midtown every Thursday in the middle of the school day for shots designed to desensitize me to the allergens that the experts insisted triggered my asthma. No one picked me up or accompanied me. My mom and her constant companions, Mr. and Mrs. Marlboro Lights (she had dumped Mr. Lucky Strikes for filtered cigarettes because they were supposedly safer), couldn't muster much sympathy. She kept the windows closed in my bedroom because the doctor insisted that cold air was tough on my breathing, and she sat me in the smoking section when we went to the movies. She insisted I take my medication, which zapped my pulse into the stratosphere like a jittery rocket and made me sick to my stomach, but her aversion to vomit meant I had to throw up alone, curled up on the bathroom floor, clutching the sides of the toilet as the waves of nausea gradually receded.

I'd been taught by experts to stuff my problems into silence. Maybe my body had taken the lessons to heart. Maybe this was payback: no more room down there, not even for oxygen.

My departure for boarding school in tenth grade had improved my health. Dana Hall was in Wellesley, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, where the air was cleaner, my bedroom was free of cat hair, and I was far away from my family drama. I had lived with my father,
stepmother, and three siblings for less than a year when I fled to Dana Hall, desperate to escape the tension of living in a household dominated by a woman who continued to repeat that she never wanted children and didn't care for the ones under her roof. Constant arguing and putdowns by BG wore me down, especially because my father almost always took her side. No matter what I did, excelled or under-performed, BG was never satisfied. To counter BG's success in swaying my father's opinion, I welcomed solo time with him. Nonetheless, for a former star goody-goody, my change in status to bad-attitude girl felt crushing.

Maybe all my lungs had needed was a break from home. My entire first year I remained symptom-free. The next year, I quit my medical protocols cold turkey. Medication was for weenies, people who weren't strong enough to take care of themselves. And what happened as a result of going AWOL from my shots and medications? Nothing. I survived just fine. No wheezing, no asthma, no sudden attacks, no emergency room visits. I was cured.

Conned by the quieting of my asthma's symptoms in high school and their continued absence through my freshman year at Yale, I forgot about my breathing condition. The diagnosing doctor had warned my mother: when asthma develops at puberty, it will likely remain a lifelong condition, but I was determined to disprove that rule. Two years and counting without symptoms, and during that period I'd become a college varsity athlete. I'd rowed an entire year asthma-free.

Until now, October of sophomore year.

One night, I woke suddenly in my dorm room bed and grabbed for the pillow that seemed to be covering my face, but found nothing. It was pitch black and cold. I was breathing hard, as if I'd been running in my dreams, but the weight in my chest woke me up to confront a nightmare.

Breathing is supposed to come easy: an involuntary action, the most fundamental of survival skills. Conscious or not, awake or asleep, the human body keeps on inhaling, exhaling, doing its job.

Not mine, not now. I tried to inhale rapidly, hoping a quick intake would force the air to the bottom of my lungs. No such luck. I tried exhaling quickly, following that push with a second sharp intake. The air whistled inside me as it tried to squeeze through my narrowed bronchial
tubes. I closed my eyes and strained. Muscles across my back and chest, ill designed for breathing, pitched in to move the oxygen down.

I wanted to yell, “I can't breathe! Help!” but I didn't have the lung power and I was all alone in my dorm room.

I found my alarm clock. It was 3:30 a.m. I wondered when I could call the Department of Undergraduate Health Services and reach Molly Meyer, the nurse in charge of the varsity athletes. “Wait until morning” argued with “This is pretty bad.”

Suddenly I didn't even have the energy for the internal debate. I shut my eyes, forced my brain to shut up the panic chatter, and watched myself breathe. It was bad. Very bad.

The moments ticked by. The attack did not subside. Wishful thinking wasn't doing the trick. The snake had me by the throat; only medication would break its grip.

But, there was no way I would follow in my mother's footsteps and take pills to solve a problem I should be able to handle on my own. I had to tough out this attack. Giving in to my own demons would be the death of me, as my mother's had nearly been for her. Five years had passed since my mother's middle-of-the-night phone call to my father informing him she'd murdered their two youngest children, and she still had not recovered her equilibrium, continuing to drink heavily and pop mystery pills. She had spent much of her time living in Europe and maintained loose contact, writing aerograms and returning to New York for vacations and holidays bearing expensive gifts. But when it came to showing up as a reliable and sober parent, she struck out every time.

Training is simply a repetitive execution of a pattern of movement. Learning describes the brain rewiring that occurs when we practice anything. New neural connections develop and strengthen as skills improve. When our patterns become second nature, they've been committed to cellular memory. Cognitive thought processes are no longer necessary. And in difficult moments, when fear is in charge and unleashes adrenaline to course through your veins, mustering reasoning skills is enormously difficult. When the chips are down, your cerebral cortex is last in line to receive sensory information. It has no time to solve your problem, but your muscle memory can function on automatic pilot.

Now my fear, masquerading as intelligence, was warning me that if I took drugs, I could end up just like my mother. Weak. Dependent. Unable to cope. Mom had told me so herself one day when I was reciting all the ways she'd let me down. I swore I would be different. “Never say never,” she responded. “You could end up just like me.”

What unwritten lessons had I derived from Mom's breakdown? I'd never murmured a word of them to a sane adult. I didn't know that mental illness and addiction caused similar behaviors; no one had even told me that my mother was mentally ill. Dad knew—he had spoken to her doctors—but he kept it a secret and let us kids think she just had a drinking problem. He pretended she would be okay, just as he always wanted me to pretend I didn't have asthma.

But on this night I wasn't going to just lay there and let myself ruin my life. Betrayed by my deficient body with its ineffective lungs, I needed help. As much as the idea terrified me, I had to follow my mother's path. I needed medication to breathe, just as she had thought she needed alcohol and drugs to survive.

Slowly, I sat up and swung my legs over the side of my bed. I stood up, wheezing, and waited for the dizziness to subside. I shuffled to the phone, dialed the number for the campus health services. All I could think about was one deep breath reaching all the way down to my core, giving me a chance to live another day. Just give me that one hit of breathing.

“Ginny, you can't keep doing this to yourself,” said Molly Meyer, who stood by my hospital bed, stethoscope hanging from her neck. Starting with that October asthma attack, my breathing had gone to hell: now it was winter and Molly could justly claim me as her most frequent visitor to Health Services. The presiding physician, Dr. Jokel, knew me on sight.

Night was ready to yield to dawn. Molly held my hand and stroked my forehead. My hair felt damp, my skin clammy. The aftereffects of the adrenaline were wearing off. My heart had stopped romping and slowed to a trot. I was breathing normally, gratefully.

“It's okay. I'll be fine.” I was drowsy. Finally, I could relax and sleep. I was safe.

The next day I discovered how safe.

“Wait, what did you say?” I sat in a chair in Molly's cramped office. Disbelief made my voice squeak.

Molly shrugged, as if helpless and unhappy, but I could see the no-nonsense look in her eyes. “It's not safe for you to continue rowing without using daily medication to control your asthma.”

“But I'm fine. Look at me, all better! Besides, I can't do that.”

“You can't keep ending up in the emergency room in the middle of the night. Asthma is a serious condition. People die from it.”

“Meds don't help. They make me feel horrible. I'll be okay.”

“You're right. You will be.” Molly handed me a sheet of paper. “This is for Nat. He needs to know you've been placed on athletic disability.”

“What?”

“No more rowing until you deal with your asthma.”

“You can't do this!”

“I can and I have. Dr. Jokel agrees. He approved the decision,” Molly said calmly. “Ginny, you have a serious health problem. You need medication. Why is this so difficult for you?”

“I can take care of myself. I have to.”

“You have to … what? There's nothing wrong with getting help when you need it. Your body can't handle what you're doing to it.”

I heard the drumbeat start in my head and braced for the voice that would follow. Wimp, you can't do anything. What's wrong with you? That's right, take the easy way out.

Molly continued, “You are not responsible for being asthmatic. This isn't something you can fake or control. Your bronchial tubes are hypersensitive. They perceive danger where there isn't any and close up to protect you. You can't will them to be different. You have an overly vigilant defense mechanism with a hair-trigger response to many everyday allergens, and you can't ignore that anymore.”

“Everyone else does just fine without meds. I'll be giving in if I take them.”

“Giving in to what?”

“To my weakness.”

“No, you'll be acting like a responsible adult. You'll be recognizing your limitations instead of denying them. You'll be taking care of yourself, instead of acting like a child and pretending that the problem will go away if you ignore it.”

I wanted to row: Molly had me, and she knew it. Now I sighed, “Okay, what do I have to do?”