My name is Judith Santana. I am thirty-two years old, and I work as a billing coordinator for a chain of veterinary clinics in Covington, Kentucky, which means I spend my days ensuring that dog owners pay for their golden retrievers’ dental cleanings, a procedure that costs, on average, forty dollars more than my own last dental visit. This is its own category of depressing, but it is not the depressing I want to talk about today.
Let me back up about six hours.
It was a Saturday in June, Leo’s birthday, and Freya had converted our modest three-bedroom ranch on Dorsy Avenue into something that could only be described as a Pinterest board for a man who once told me his ideal birthday consisted of a good steak and nobody talking to him. There were streamers. There was a banner. There was a cake shaped like a football, which made no sense because Leo’s sport was bowling, but Freya had a vision, and questioning Freya’s vision was something you simply did not do if you wanted the rest of your afternoon to pass in any version of peace.
I had been feeling wrong for five months before that afternoon.
It started as a tingle in my feet, the pins-and-needles sensation you get from sitting too long in the same position, except that I was not sitting too long. I was standing, walking, living my ordinary life, and the sensation was there regardless. Then came the fatigue, the crushing kind that made eight-hour shifts feel like marathons I had not trained for, that sent me to bed an hour after dinner and still left me dragging through the next morning. Blurred vision that came and went without warning, once in the middle of processing a claim, the screen going soft and strange for about forty seconds before resolving. My legs giving out completely in the shower one night, no warning, no stumble, just a sudden absence of structure beneath me, my hand catching the grab bar we had installed for Freya’s visits and my heart hammering against my ribs in the dark.
Every time I mentioned these things to Leo, he had the same answer delivered in the same tone, the gentle, slightly impatient voice of a man explaining something obvious to someone who is making it complicated.
“You’re overthinking it. You’re stressed. Drink some water.”
And Freya told me, with a straight face that suggested she had no awareness of irony, that young women these days simply had no stamina. This from a woman who took a fifteen-minute seated rest after carrying a bag of dinner rolls from her car to the front door.
I was trying, that Saturday. I want that on the record. I was carrying a platter of smoked brisket from the good place on Madison Avenue, the one that charges prices that suggest the beef was raised by monks, across the driveway toward the backyard gate, and halfway there my legs simply quit. Not a stumble, not a slip. They switched off the way a light switches off when someone cuts the power. I went down hard, the platter first, then my knees, then my face, and I lay there on the hot concrete with brisket grease soaking into my blouse and I could not move my legs. Could not feel them. I tried to wiggle my toes and received nothing back. Absolute zero below my hips.
