June 2006 - vivid memories

Here's another entry to fill in what happened in June of 2006, before the blog was created:

A year ago this week I had traveled to Cleveland for a business meeting and life was going pretty well. We'd had the mishap with Robin's energy level while biking in Montreal, but within three days of arriving home we had seen a Gastroenterologist about her stomach (Robin had developed a habit of going to any of my appointments with specialists so it was only natural for me to now accompany her - two heads are better than one!). The doctor had prescribed "the little purple pill" and he stated that the next step would be an endoscopy (scoping her stomach) if she didn't show any signs of improvement.

Well, it turns out things weren't that simple because the medication caused her to break out in hives. She'd never cared much for medication - just the year before she had discovered she was allergic to penicillin. And apparently an allergy to penicillin only becomes noticeable the second time in your life that you take the medication - so she really hadn't needed much in the way of prescriptions as she grew up.

The biggest concern at this stage was that we were scheduled to do a week long bike ride at the end of July but her stomach discomfort was increasing each week and beginning to interfere with her ability to get out and bike. I was still "in training" and even on my business trip I managed to find a place to rent bikes so I had biked three nights in a row - two nights on my own and one night with three teammates from work.

So it was the morning of Friday June 14th, 2006 that I was driving to the medical center with two of my teammates for the last day of some meetings with our customer. Those of us going home in the afternoon had already checked out of the hotel and we had our luggage in the car. We'd made an obligatory stop at Starbucks and were nearly at our destination when my cell phone beeped at 7:48am. I fished it out of my pocket and saw Robin was calling. I remember thinking, "that's odd", I usually speak to her every night and I'm expecting to be home at 4:00pm. She must have a question about something. I didn't want to talk while I was driving, and I'd be able to call her in about twenty minutes, so I let the call go to voicemail.

We arrived at our destination and lugged our briefcases into the meeting room. I headed outside the building, sat on a bench and called Robin back at 8:08am. We talked for sixteen minutes. She stated that she'd had an awful headache the night before. She took 600mg of Advil and it didn't stop the pain. She took another 400mg and it barely made a difference. (I remember thinking - is it healthy to take that much Advil at once??) The pain had been so bad that she could've taken a hammer to her head just to make it stop. Something else disturbing had also been happening which she hadn't told me about earlier. Three days in a row she'd had a nosebleed. In each instance she was just busy doing something when her nose spontaneously dripped a few drops of blood and then stopped.

A nervous feeling came over me though we both continued to talk matter-of-factly. So this is how it starts. Everything that was presently happening in your world disappears. Your mind gets confused. It becomes difficult to think straight. It feels like the world stops spinning and everything comes down to an intense focal point. This is one instance when "being connected to the universe" doesn’t give a warm fuzzy feeling. We discussed that she should call her doctor for an appointment, and I noted that I expected to be home at 4pm, but I'd check on a few things and give her a call back.

I hung up the phone and sat there, alone on the bench, on a sunny Spring day.

I usually carry a schedule of return flights. I looked at the info. There was an earlier flight. I paused and thought for a moment. Many years ago I'd read the "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", so long ago that now that the details are a little fuzzy. However, I knew someone who taught "Seven Habits" classes. I thought about a conversation we had in which he stood at my desk and recited his "life priority list" which in brief consisted of: God, Family, and Work.

I considered the priorities in my life and dwelled upon whether or not I needed to ask permission for what I needed to do now. Nope. Three minutes after I'd hung up with Robin I dialed the travel agent. A moment later I was booked on a flight arriving home at 12:45pm. I called a third teammate who was not yet at the meeting and asked for an early ride to the airport.

I called Robin back. I explained that I'd home in about four hours. She noted that she had a 1:15 appointment with her doctor. Hmmm…perfect timing. For the next five months it would feel as if the universe was working with us, taking us to the right people at the right time, continuing to support us, continuing to help us Get Things Done.

A new project manager had just joined the team (my new boss) and I'd first met him the night before. I went back inside the building and asked him to come outside and talk with me. I remember him saying something as we walked out the doors, but I couldn't hear any of the words. I tried to tell him my wife was sick and I had booked an earlier flight to go home but the words weren't coming out of my mouth in any organized fashion. Mostly nothing was coming out of my mouth, but I expect my face was showing how upset I was. The nervousness was already escalating.

Apparently enough words came out of my mouth to communicate some kind of emergency. I remember him saying that if I was asking for his permission to change my travel that I should just go ahead and make changes, that family was more important than work. I remember thinking in my cluttered head, "hey, it's already done".

We went back to the meeting room and I managed to tell my teammates that I was leaving early. I mentioned the headache and bloody nose. One of the folks in the room was staring at their laptop and absentmindedly said "a bloody nose and bad headache - that can't be good". Yep, that's what my feelings had already told me. I sat in the meeting for another ten minutes awaiting my ride. Watching the people in the room talk, but not hearing anything that was said, just wondering when my ride would arrive.

I recall the ride to the airport. I can't recall what we talked about, but I remember trying to hold a conversation while my mind continued to try to process what was going on at home.

I recall arriving at the airport gate and searching for a power outlet to plug in my phone. I called Robin and we talked again for thirty minutes before I had to board the flight.

All these memories are still so vivid to me that they could have happened yesterday. Kind of like how people remember where they were when Kennedy was shot, or what they were doing on 9/11.

My last memory of Cleveland was seeing the city from my window seat on the regional jet. I remember processing the fact that we must have taken off to the West because after a long slow right turn I could see the entire city and the south shoreline of Lake Erie framed in the window. I remember my mind still trying to grasp what was going on, but knowing in my heart that my life would never be the same again.