Three months later, I wearily pulled into a motor lodge somewhere in Pennsylvania. I don’t remember the name of the motel, or the town in Pennsylvania it was in. It was supposed to be a forgotten resting point, not the place where my quarter-life crisis would officially begin. I’d been driving for three days. After finishing the school year, I was heading to Maine for my tenth summer at camp, now as a Head Counselor and water-skiing director. I’d spend the summer there and then return to Colorado to ski instruct for the winter. I was supposed to make the cross-country trek with Jim. Instead, I’d driven straight across the Midwest by myself, accompanied only by swaying corn fields, enormous freight trucks that made my Jeep look like an ant, and the occasional cow on the side of the road. Finally, I pulled into the motel parking lot and stumbled into the main office to book a room.
On my twenty-fifth birthday in early May, Jim and I had toasted “To us!” Days later, he’d suddenly announced his “feelings had changed.” No amount of arguing or protesting could get him to explain or reconsider. Just when I thought we were getting more serious, he walked out of my life as quickly as he’d skied into it.
“He’s a schmuck,” my hometown best friend Sharon told me over the phone as I lugged my bags into the motel room in Pennsylvania, grumbling to her about the recent breakup. “He doesn’t deserve you.”
Cradling the phone with my chin so I could use both hands to double lock the door, I said, “I get that, rationally. I just never expected this to happen. This wasn’t part of the plan.”
“But you’re still going to spend a season in the mountains,” Sharon reminded me. “That’s been your dream since we were kids and you’re about to live it. You don’t need him.”
I dropped my keys on the bureau and sat down on the bed. The room was dusty and dark, with heavy maroon curtains that matched the worn bedspread. The stagnant air was thick with stale air freshener, the carpeting so dank that I kept my flip flops on.
“You’re a strong person,” Sharon said. “You always come out the other side, just like with your knee. You’ll be at camp soon, and this will all be behind you.”
I felt better for a moment, picturing the camp’s crystal-clear lake that had welcomed me home for ten summers. I couldn’t wait to be nestled among the pines on the shore, laughing with friends I’d known since we were campers ourselves.
Despite the happy visual, I was suddenly overcome with fatigue. Laying back on the thin pillows, I muttered to Sharon, “Thanks for talking. I’m going to rest for a bit.” I hung up and closed my eyes.
Bouts of low energy were not unusual for me. Like most twenty-somethings, I often sacrificed sleep for the sake of spending time with friends, hitting the slopes, or staying up until the wee hours grading papers. I seemed to get sick more often than my peers, but my body was young, and I could generally count on it to rebound when I pushed it too hard. Whenever sleep pleaded with me, I simply ignored it and relied on adrenaline to kick in and keep me going.
What was alarming that night in Pennsylvania was that nothing kicked in. It was as if someone had hit the off button and my whole system shut down. I lay in the darkening room, sensing the sun setting outside the thick curtains. After an hour or so, my stomach grumbled, but I couldn’t bring myself to get up. I fumbled for the phone on the nightstand and ordered a heaping plate of undercooked, overpriced room service pasta. I ate it in bed, staring at cheap paintings of mountains, the standard artwork of motel rooms across America.
After dinner, I changed into a pair of raggedy boxer shorts and a tee shirt and climbed into bed for real. When I was driving that day, I’d promised myself I’d go for a run around the motel parking lot the next morning, since I felt like a slug from sitting in the car for so long. As I set my alarm, however, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to get up at 7:00 a.m. I set the alarm for 10:00 a.m. Then I turned out the light.
But I didn’t fall asleep. As I closed my eyes, I felt the familiar sensation of a low blood sugar reaction coming on. Even though I’d just eaten, I was once again starving, the hunger gnawing like a hollow space that ran from the center of my head to the pit of my stomach. “I just finished a huge dinner,” I groaned aloud. “Can’t I please sleep?” My body ignored my plea, responding instead with a racing heart, sweaty palms, and a dizziness that would have made me pass out had I not been lying down.
These blood sugar crashes had been coming on at nonsensical times for six years. The first occurred at camp in 1997, the same summer I’d found the strange red rash on my arm. I had just walked into the dining hall for lunch. The room held rows of long wooden tables and benches. As I sat down at the head of a table in the center row, the room started spinning. Everything became blurry. I could hear the din of the campers but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Through hazy vision I discerned their worried faces. Quickly, I rose from the table, and just as quickly, my gelatin knees gave out.
With the help of the camp nurse, I made my way to the adjacent counselor’s room and sank down on a tattered couch. My heart raced. With clammy hands, I tried to wipe the sweat off my brow. Black splotches danced menacingly in front of my eyes. As the room started to grow dark, the nurse put a dry plastic spoon in my mouth. I tasted the succulent juice of perfectly ripened blueberries mixed with sweet syrup.
Within moments, the shaking subsided. Sensation returned to my lips, my cheeks, and finally my appendages. Everything in the room started to come into focus; blurred images morphed back into smiling faces and concerned eyes.
The nurse propped my head on a pillow and handed me a glass of orange juice and some crackers with peanut butter. “You had a low blood sugar reaction,” she said. “You should get tested for diabetes.”
Tests later showed I was not diabetic, but I was hypoglycemic, a condition I’d never heard of before that summer. I learned if a person with hypoglycemia doesn’t eat at regular intervals, their blood sugar can drop dangerously below 70 milligrams per deciliter of blood, causing the symptoms I experienced. I didn’t understand why I would suddenly develop this condition at camp, where I ate well and took better care of my body than I did the rest of the year. No one seemed too concerned with the answer. I was told to simply keep little snacks on hand, and to make sure I ate regular meals.
The low blood sugar reaction I experienced in the Pennsylvania motel room, six years after the first one in 1997, was similar to the crashes I’d felt so many times before. I got out of bed and shuffled in the dark to reach my bags, scrounging up a package of cookies from the bottom of my purse. I ate them quickly, not even bothering to get a glass of water to wash them down, and got back into bed. Within minutes I felt better and finally drifted into a deep sleep.
When the alarm went off the next morning, I felt like I’d been sleeping for only an hour, two at most. But when I peeked out from under the covers, I saw that the clock glowed 10:03. I rubbed my eyes. My body felt like lead.
I would have drifted right back to sleep, had I not happened to swallow as I turned my head against the pillow. The pain in my throat suddenly had me wide awake. I sat up and swallowed again. Maybe I was just lying in a funny position, I thought. Maybe there are still pieces of cookie stuck in my throat. I swallowed a few more times. No, it was definitely a sore throat. Instinctively, I reached up and felt the sides of my neck; my glands were swollen, too. Great. Now what? I needed to get to Connecticut to visit with my family before I was due to arrive at camp in less than a week. I didn’t have time to be sick.
I plodded to the bathroom. My face was pale, the skin around my brown eyes puffy and framed with dark circles. I splashed cold water on my face. You’re sick. Just get back into bed, sleep, and drive tomorrow. The rational side of me contemplated this idea for about three seconds. Then the go-go-go, do-do-do side of me took over, as it always did, and tucked prudence under the covers without me.
I threw on a cotton sundress, gathered my long dark hair into a messy bun, and hit the road before I could rethink my plan. I drove with all the windows open and the music blaring, sucking on a lollipop as a sort of two-in-one remedy for my throbbing throat and mounting fatigue. This worked until halfway across the New Jersey turnpike, when exhaustion threatened to take over the way it had the night before.
It was 2:30 in the afternoon. Undoubtedly, I had a fever. But you’re just a few hours from Connecticut. You can’t stop now. I did permit myself to stop at a rest area, but instead of using the place for reasons its name would suggest, I simply bought some fake energy in the form of a soda and a chocolate ice cream cone.
When I at last trudged up the stone walkway to my mother and stepfather’s house, I was bordering on delirium.
“Jen’s home!” my mom called out as she pushed open the screen door to greet me.
“I don’t feel so good,” I whimpered, giving her a limp hug.
“You don’t look so good.” My mom smoothed her hand across my forehead. “You’re warm.”
I walked into the kitchen where my stepfather and fifteen-year-old half-sister Elizabeth were sitting at the round oak table. Elizabeth grimaced when she saw me; she was probably wondering if this is how breakups always made people look and was reconsidering her recent interest in boys.
“I made your favorite,” my mother chirped. She put on her old green apron and collected the white plates off the table, loading them with sizzling stacks of eggplant parmesan. The food looked so good, but I was too tired to eat it. All I wanted to do was sleep. So just like in the Peter Rabbit stories she used to read me at bedtime, my mom replaced my dinner with chamomile tea and sent me to bed. We both figured a good night’s sleep would do the trick.
My first thought when I awoke the next morning was, There are needles in my throat. Slowly, I sat up and got out of bed. My head was foggy. If there was any question left about calling a doctor, one glance in the bathroom mirror sealed the deal. My glands were enormous. I looked like one of those blown-up frogs on the cover of high school Biology books.
Having lived in Colorado for two years, I no longer had a doctor in Connecticut. I called my mother at work. “Who is this?” she asked when my voice came out in a husky rasp.
“It’s me, Jen. Your daughter?”
“Oh, you sound awful.” She gave me the number for a doctor she’d recently seen. “Don’t worry,” my mom said as we hung up. “You probably have strep. All you need is a few days of antibiotics and you’ll be good to go.”
The doctor was so sure of this same diagnosis that she didn’t bother to do a strep culture when I saw her later that day. Handing me a prescription for a short course of antibiotics, she said, “You’ll be fine in a few days.”
A few days later, I was anything but fine. The glands on my neck had gotten larger, and others had painfully popped out all over my body. My sore throat, dotted each day with bigger and bigger white spots, only permitted me to eat soup, applesauce, and popsicles; in just three days, I’d dropped six pounds. Despite round-the-clock ibuprofen, a low-grade fever persisted. I slept more than twenty hours a day.
“You need to give the medicine time to work,” the doctor said when I called to say my symptoms had only gotten worse.
“I thought antibiotics are supposed to kick in within forty-eight hours.”
The doctor sighed. “That’s true, but obviously you have a very bad case of strep, so it’ll probably take longer.”
I wasn’t convinced. Taking a deep breath, I said what a part of me already knew was true but hadn’t wanted to admit. “Do you think I might have mono?”
“There’s no way you have mono,” she replied. “You don’t have any of the symptoms.”
I furrowed my brow in confusion. I’d been tested for mono enough times in college to know the typical symptoms: sore throat, swollen glands, fever, and fatigue. Sophomore year, after the summer at camp when I found the rash and developed hypoglycemia, I’d been plagued by a flu that rendered me unable to attend class or even walk to the dining hall. When a mono test came back negative, I was told that I was probably just stressed or run down. That same flu came back on and off throughout college. Each time it did, I prayed that I didn’t have mono; I knew how long it could take to get over that virus, and I didn’t have time for it.
Even though previous mono tests had always come back negative, I had a bad feeling this time would be different; this felt worse than my usual flu. “I’d like to get tested anyway, just to be sure,” I requested.
Over the few days as I waited for the test results, I talked myself out of my own reasoning and started to believe the doctor’s words. When her nurse called, I greeted her cheerily, croaked, “Thanks!” and almost hung up before I heard her ask if I understood what she’d said. “It’s positive. Your mono test was positive.”
“What?!” I held the phone away from my face, grimacing at it as if it were the virus itself. Positive? Positive? “Are you sure?” My voice caught.
“Yes. I’m sorry. Be sure to get plenty of rest, and drink lots of fluids.” The nurse didn’t sound so sorry. She sounded like she was delivering the weather report, and if I’d please just thank her and hang up, she could move on to her next call.
“But…wait. I mean, is that really all I can do? How long will it take?”
“It’s a virus. There’s nothing you can do but rest. It usually takes about two weeks to get over the acute symptoms, maybe longer.”
“Two weeks? I don’t have two weeks!” My mind spun, thinking of the pre-camp training sessions I was supposed to run in less than forty-eight hours, of the counselors in my unit who would need a leader, of my campers who would look to me to comfort their homesickness in just a few nights. “You don’t understand,” I whined. “I have to be in Maine in two days.”
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said again. “But you have mono. You can’t.”
“Can’t” was not part of my vocabulary. As a Taurus, my stubbornness didn’t let me take “no” for an answer. There was no way I was letting what must have been a parting gift from Jim hold me back from a summer at camp, a tonic I needed more than ever.
I told the doctor as much when I went to her office later that day to see if there was anything she could tell me that the nurse on the phone hadn’t. I’m not sure why I even went back to that doctor after she’d been wrong about mono, but I was desperate.
“Tell me exactly what you’d be doing at camp,” she said as she felt my liver and spleen, organs that can become dangerously enlarged and possibly ruptured from mono.
I gave her a watered-down description of my responsibilities, stressing the time I’d spend just sitting in the ski boat and the rest hour and free periods built into the schedule when I could sleep. I neglected to mention that as a Head Counselor, my free time was often usurped by problems in my unit I needed to solve; that late-night meetings frequently kept me up well past “Taps”; that as the oldest returning counselor, the camp directors would count on my leadership in ways that didn’t allow for a “step back and rest” attitude. But so narrow was my tunnel vision of getting to camp that even I seemed to have forgotten just how much energy my job required.
“Well, your liver and spleen are not enlarged,” the doctor said tentatively, “but you’re still very sick.”
“What about steroids?” I’d read they could help alleviate the acute symptoms of mono.
The doctor pursed her chapped lips. “That’s a very new technique. It’s still controversial and is only used in very serious cases.”
“Which mine is!”
The doctor tapped her pen on her notebook and her right navy ballet flat on the floor. “All right,” she finally relented. “I’ll give you the prescription.”
I smiled for the first time in days.
“You still need to take it very, very easy,” she cautioned as she handed me the coveted piece of white paper. “You can’t go to camp until at least the Fourth of July.”
That was just over two weeks away! The permission to still go to camp suddenly made a two-week delay seem not so bad at all.
Friends who’d had mono cautioned that the fatigue could last much longer than the prescribed two weeks and that going to camp would be too much of a push. My father expressed concern when I called to tell him my plan. “I’m worried you’re going to wear yourself out and you won’t be ready to ski this winter. You’ve got to think long-term.”
“I can’t miss camp,” I insisted. “They’ve already got another Head Counselor starting late. They really need me there.” My blinders didn’t let me see that my seemingly selfless proffer of help was, in fact, quite selfish. What camp really needed was for me to give my all, and I wasn’t going to be able to do that. I was also blinded by the young, naïve mentality that eventually, illness went away. I knew so few chronically ill people that I could express sympathy for them, but did not understand their lived experience, and certainly never thought it could happen to me. I was sick a lot, but I always got better. I thought resilience meant pushing through, not stopping to rest.
“I’ll be fine by fall,” I assured my dad. “Most people get over mono in a month. The steroids are going to make recovery go a lot faster.”
“You’re sure?” It was unlike my father to suggest I give something up; he always wanted me to keep going, to strive higher. The fact that he was so concerned about me going to camp should have been a warning of the serious jeopardy in which I was putting my future plans, but I simply said, “Winter is a long time away. I can always rest more in the fall if I need to. I’ll be fine for ski season.”
My mind was made up. I rested for two weeks, as promised. My acute symptoms cleared up. On July 5th, I got back in my Jeep and made the five-hour trip from Connecticut to Maine.
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