Chapter Three
Los Angeles, autumn, 1997
“Because I spent four long years and thousands of dollars perfecting my craft and I think I deserve a chance to show you what I can do!” Dorina asserted. She cringed inside, knowing that her words came out more high-pitched and breathy than she had hoped they would. For two weeks she had been practicing her speech in front of the mirror and had even videotaped herself. When her chance to meet with managing editor Victor DeGraffenried finally arrived, she felt like an Olympic gymnast who stubbed her toe at the beginning of her routine.
Silently, Victor regarded her for a moment. She could hear clattering keys and muffled conversation from behind the closed door. Her eyes glanced at the sheaves of paper, the framed degrees on the wall behind him and pictures of him shaking the governor’s hand, meeting President Reagan and standing in front of the “Hollywood” sign with a group of fifty other journalists. There was an empty “Ho Ho” wrapper on top of Victor’s desk, perched in front of a belly that strained against the lower buttons of his oxford shirt. When she glanced up again she saw green eyes flashing out from a face that shrugged, smirking at her. “Do you realize how many thousands of kids across this country could say the same thing?”
Dorina felt an urge to sigh but forced herself to take a deep breath instead. “You could start me off small,” she said. “Just send me to cover a small event or something. I’d be so grateful.”
He waved a hand dismissively at her. “We’ve got stringers to handle little piss ant jobs like that,” he said, taking a bite out of a ho-ho. “Now tell me really why you want to write for us when you’ve already got a good job in sales admin.”
Dorina decided to try a different tactic. She had also spent the previous four weeks imagining every possible scenario that could occur in her meeting. Strictly for effect, she paused thoughtfully, looking at him through his too-large eyeglasses. “Weren’t you ever in my position? In front of the desk, trying to get your break? Do you remember how it felt?”
She succeeded in getting him to stop munching on the Ho-ho and put it down while he gazed out into space thoughtfully for a moment. “Yeah, I remember,” he said. “It was the tail end of the sixties. I would’ve covered a tiddlywinks match for God’s sake or washed the chief’s Cadillac. I offered to pay my way back east if they’d let me cover Woodstock.”
“You see!” Dorina said, congratulating herself. “And you kept at it and got better and better as more and more people gave you breaks and look at where you are now!”
“Yup,” he said, talking around a mouthful of chocolate and whipped cream. “But let me tell you something. It’s different now. We got CNN, we got MTV, we got cable with two hundred channels or whatever, and talk radio. Lots of competition. And it’s getting to be a fast, crazy world. People are finding less and less time to read. You young kids getting out of school think this is cake. Well, talk to my cardiologist.”
Dorina had heard all the arguments before. Like five years earlier when she announced to her parents that she wanted to go to college for journalism and her father snorted and said “Why don’t you go for something useful, like nursing?” Other people also warned her that journalism was a highly competitive and overly crowded field.
But there’s always room for one more really good one, she told herself.
“Well, what do you think I could do to improve my chances? Of getting a byline?” she asked, trying to gain at least something useful from the interview.
Victor shrugged again. “Talk to people. Keep your eyes and ears open. ‘Network’ as they call it now.” He made quotation mark signs with both hands by jiggling his thumbs and first two fingers. “And you’re doing fine.” He started to stand up, a cue that their little chat was ending. “They speak really high of you in sales.”
He was reassuring her that she needed to feel good about what she had achieved so far. True, many of the people she’d gone to college with had settled for lesser jobs, such as retail management for an office supplies store or they waited tables while going on to grad school. A couple of girls she knew got married and dropped out of the game altogether. But she was different. Damn it, she thought when she closed the door behind her. She had graduated over four years ago. At this rate she’d still be working spread sheets for ad sales when she was sixty! Rent in the tiny one bedroom apartment where she lived was over seven hundred dollars. Car insurance, groceries, gasoline, it was all more expensive on the west coast than back in Ohio. She was still paying on student loans and the credit card balances. Ouch! She didn’t even want to think about that but she needed to find some way to get the wardrobe she needed to fit in out here. Her legs, in the designer hose she’d splurged on, felt very heavy when they carried her back to her desk, slump shouldered while she glanced at the notes.
Once she plopped down she tossed a client folder toward the far corner of her desktop and logged absently into her terminal. Was that assistant managing editor post still open in Cincinnati? She could probably live a lot more cheaply out there, though in the winter the weather would suck. Oh well. She was about to click onto the “Careers” tab when the phone rang. “Sales, this is Dorina Pettit, can I help you?” she said, wondering if she sounded as dispassionate as she felt.
A long silence caused her to wonder whether a telemarketer had dialed her. Then the softly modulating male tones chilled her bones deliciously. “I don’t know. Can you?”
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey, back. You ok?
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Doesn’t sound like it..”
Dorina sighed. Mitch was a lawyer but sometimes she wondered if he couldn’t make a better living on one of those psychic hotlines. “Well I had the meeting with Mr. Ho ho.”
“And?” Mitch paused, after he had dragged out the one syllable word to two.
“He wasn’t impressed. I might as well have been trying to sell him life insurance.” She sighed again.
“Dori, that’s how those people are. They control the careers of hotshot journalists and have seen and heard everything. He agreed to meet with you, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” she shrugged. “I’ll tell you more about it later.”
“How about tonight?”
“Maybe. I’ll let you know.” When they ended their phone call, she wondered if she told him the right thing.
The most horrendous of Dorina’s migraine headaches always started off with a small throb. Whether she was at work, at home, or at the beach on the weekend, they would start like a dripping faucet that would keep going until a volume the equivalent to Niagara Falls would rush through. They’d started in her senior year of high school when she would only attend class in the morning but would work 40 hours a week at the mall and try to keep a relationship going with her boyfriend all at the same time. As she approached her thirtieth birthday, things became even more complicated.
While the throbbing had started on a Tuesday afternoon at work, she knew that at least she could look forward to a quiet evening at home. Quickly, however, she realized that she had to go to the gym for salsa class or she would gain five pounds overnight. While her college degree had been in journalism and she’d often dreamt about interviewing famous and influential people, revealing their human side, instead she felt more like a bookkeeper. Day in and day out she would pore over spreadsheets of receivables for ad copy from the magazine’s clients, wondering when she was ever going to make it to the next level.
Her father had said that it was good to find a mentor in business to help you move up the ladder. “Find one of the reporters there you admire,” he said. “Offer to buy them lunch. Find out what makes them tick. Then use what you can and leave the rest.”
By four-thirty, the trickling had swelled to a stream with notions of becoming a downpour. She picked up the phone and hit the uppermost speed dial digit. After only two rings the line connected from the other end and she heard the familiar soothing, modulating tones: ??
?Contracts, Mitch Pomeroy here.”
“It’s me.”
He paused for a moment, as if he were letting the sound of her voice soak in. “Ooh. You don’t sound good.”
“Well then don’t ask me how I feel.” She cradled her forehead in her hand as she slumped over her desk.
Mitch sighed. “Is it a five?” They had worked out a scale for the severity of her migraines, with one or two being the kind she could try to tame with aspirin, three or four the kind she needed to stay at home with the lights out, lying down, and five was the level requiring medical assistance.
“Yes,” she said quietly, since it hurt her to speak any louder.
“Oh boy,” he replied, and he grumbled a couple of other things under his breath and away from the telephone receiver. “Honey, I don’t know if I can get away from here and get to you in time. Would you be able to drive?”
“No.” She worried that he would tell her to board the Magavan or get a slot cab. “I need help.”
The volume of Mitch’s voice from the other end drifted up and down as she imagined him running his fingers through his hair and making stabbing motions with the telephone handset. “Okay. Okay.”
“Well, when can you get here?”
“Geez hon, I’ve got things to do, there’s traffic…”
“It’s almost a quarter to five. Just leave when you’re supposed to. See you soon. Take care of yourself!”
While she waited for Mitch to show up at the front office reception desk, she let her head slump all the way down to her desktop. She closed her eyes, knowing that as the pain increased the glare of the artificial fluorescent lights overhead would bolt through her temples like steel rods. Her friend Kayla passed by and said “Must be a bad one this time, huh?” in a friendly tone, as if she was discussing her backhand while they were playing tennis. Dorina tried to grumble back a response but already knew that her friend had made it through the other doorway and would not hear her.
A short while later, Mitch arrived. Bridget, the front desk receptionist, called for her. She gathered her purse and stood up slowly, in stages or else the sudden movement would cause her to feel light-headed and cause her to faint. The glare from the light overhead caused her to squint and wince so that she had to feel around in front of her to wind her way through the hallways and cubicles. When she saw his smiling face, however, she felt slightly better. He was wearing his sharply tailored navy pin-striped suit which always made him look as though he were on his way to an important trial rather than being a lawyer who just did paperwork. They were both in the same boat, career wise, she often realized, which was why they got on so well.
Their relationship had survived in spite of this, at least it had so far. When she met him at the front, he put his arm around her. Since he was several inches taller than her, he could cradle her inward to the nape of his neck. His warmth and masculine scent further comforted her as he shepherded her out into the parking lot. With his tousled, sandy hair and casual manner, many people often commented that Mitch seemed more like a record store employee than an attorney but at times like this his easygoing attitude helped greatly.
Mitch helped Dorina into his car, a bi-powered BMW with leather seats and a four figure aftermarket stereo system. “Same place?” he asked, as he fired up the ignition and checked the mirrors.
“Same place,” she said as she leaned down and set her throbbing head atop the console. When she had settled it there, Mitch dutifully caressed her neck and hair while the car lurched forward and backward as he worked his way out of the parking lot. As always, Dorina hung her head low and perceived the movement of the car as it made turns and traveled backward and forward, but was too caught up in the crux of her pain to notice anything. Small bumps would cause her forehead to bounce lightly against the console, which would make her feel as if an ice pick were being driven through her skull.
Soon Mitch stopped the car, turned off the radio and engine, got out himself and walked around to the passenger door to help Dorina. During such times she always felt coddled and cherished, as Mitch would gather her in closely and help her across the parking lot toward the Emergency Room entrance. It was a Tuesday night; she managed to think in between savage slices of pain brought about by the cruel fluorescent lights in the lobby. She always had to wince and squint to keep the pain at bay, but she could still see a lobby filled with anxious looking people in various states of medical malaise. A mother with her elementary school age son, who held his hand upright, swathed in a blood soaked towel, an old married couple who sat taking turns patting each other’s wrists assuredly, a teenage girl with spiked hair who gnawed at her nails expectantly, a businessman in a three piece suit who sweated and tugged at his collar. “Great,” she announced out loud in the general direction of those people plus a few more that waited, “I’ll be put at the end of the line and probably won’t be seen for hours.”
“It may not be that bad,” Mitch said. “Let’s just get you checked in and they can tell us more there.”
Dorina recognized the clerk from her most recent visit, which had occurred about a month before. The woman, who seemed to be in her early thirties, with overly processed ash blonde hair styled into a fluffy bob regarded her coolly. As they approached her counter, Mitch announced “My girlfriend’s very ill. We’d like to get checked in and be seen as soon as possible.” Though Dorina had closed her eyes by then and wished she could also close off her ears, she managed to answer most of the clerk’s questions.
“It’s about an hour wait,” the clerk said.
She felt lucky that the magazine she worked for provided insurance that gave her a variety of care options so that she could choose a well-heeled private hospital as opposed to a raucous, poorly maintained receiving facility. This meant that she would receive the best care from the best doctors the area had to offer and the waiting room furnishings were also much better. Rather than tacky vinyl like a bunch of high school cafeteria chairs joined together, the waiting room at B’Nai Brith featured chaise longues with inviting, soft cloth upholstery. Dorina drifted into and out of conscious awareness of the clock during the hour that they waited.
Before much longer, one of the nurses called Dorina forward into the doorway between the waiting room and the treatment bays. As Mitch helped her toward it, she could almost feel the screeching pain start to lift. “I’m Gail,” the nurse, a slender woman dressed in efficient pale violet scrubs said. “We’re going to start you off right here.” She indicated a space set off by an opened vinyl curtain. From previous visits, Dorina knew that she would sit atop a bed separated from the other patients by a thin curtain. It was the way the nurses and doctors probably felt they could work the best, she supposed.
Gail invited Dorina to recline against the hospital bed, which had been cranked upward so that she lay nearly in a sitting position. “I’m going to be getting your vitals and some other information from you. I understand you’re having a bad migraine?”
“Yes,” Dorina wailed as she felt the blood pressure probe tighten around her finger. Mitch sat in a low vinyl chair set beside the bed and leaned forward, cradling his hands in front of them, watching intently as the nurse continued on with her preliminaries.
“Have them often?” Gail asked.
“Every couple of weeks.”
“Where do they start? What part of your head?”
“Usually right above my right temple.” Dorina placed a fingertip against the location to show the nurse.
“Any other symptoms? Nausea? Shortness of breath?”
“Nausea, yes, shortness of breath no. At least so far, knock wood.”
Gail nodded while she noted the answers on a chart. “How would you describe the pain? On a scale of one to ten?”
“Eleven,” she replied, only half jokingly.
Gail grinned and made an entry onto the chart.
“How were my vitals?” Dorina asked. “High blood pressure runs in my family.”
“Yours was fine.
One hundred thirty nine over ninety.”
“Sheesh. That’s more than normal though. Usually I’m in the teens for the top reading and about seventy five for the lower one.”
Mitch patted her lightly on her arm. “It’s nothing to be alarmed about, love.”
“And just so that you know,” Gail went on, “your temp and pulse were fine, also.” After pausing thoughtfully for a moment, she asked Dorina something that gave her pause. “How do you normally treat the migraines?”
“I come here,” she said.
Gail whirled around and faced Dorina full front, a quizzical expression on her pixyish face. “You come here every time you have a migraine? Every time?”
Dorina sighed. “For the really intense ones I do. That’s about once a month.”
Gail looked over the chart entries again, this time studying them and saying “Hmmm.”
Feeling a sense of foreboding, Dorina asked “Is anything the matter?”
Gail glanced at the chart one last time before sliding it gently down into a slot at the foot of Dorina’s bed. “Nothing to be concerned about. We just don’t seem to have any of the prior visits documented. Can you tell me when you were here the most recent?”
“Sure. It was about a month ago.”
Gail looked at the chart again, saying “Interesting. I’m sure the doctor can clear it all up when he comes in here. That shouldn’t take too long.” As she moved toward the curtain dividing the treatment areas, Gail bent down for a moment to pat Dorina reassuringly on her knee.
Once the nurse had cleared earshot, Dorina said “I don’t like the way things are going. Do you have your phone with you? I want to call my doctor.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Mitch said. “You know how hospitals are. The chart probably just got misplaced somewhere. What would your doctor be able to do?” He stroked a few locks of her hair that fell in bangs across her forehead.
“Pull some strings,” she replied. “Get me seen earlier. Dictate parts of my history to someone.” She pulled the hospital blanket upward to her eyes to shield them from the bright fluorescent light and ease the stabbing pains. Someone somewhere had also told her to take deep breaths when she was in the middle of migraine so she started to do that as well. A thought suddenly occurred to her with dread. Closer to the holidays, when lots of junior doctors cycled through the emergency room, she’d had to get her mother involved in explaining that her daughter was in severe pain and not merely seeking drugs. “We might have to call my mom,” she murmured to Mitch, while this thought was still fresh in her mind.
“Your mother?” he said, the question weighing heavily on his tone of voice. “She’s two thousand miles away. What’s she going to be able to do?”
“She can convince the doctor I’m not a drug seeker.”
Moments later the resident appeared. He was young, not much older than Dorina herself and she was surprised to learn that he wore running shoes with his khaki slacks and white coat. In one smooth, graceful movement that seemed orchestrated, he pulled the chart from its slot, regarded Mitch, and leaned in to address Dorina. “So, Miss Pettit. I’m Dr. Nolin, a resident here. What can we do for you today?” She had opened her eyes by then, riveted back to the present moment, taking in all that was happening to her and going on around her.
“I’ve got a migraine,” she told him.
He stood back, shifted his weight from one foot to the other and scratched his chin. To Dorina it looked like a stall tactic. “Can you describe the migraine for me a little?”
“Well, doctor,” she began, with a sigh, “if you can imagine a sword that’s red hot on one side and freezing cold on the other plunging into the skull right here, then you’ll know what I mean.” She pressed her fingertips on a point just above her right temple as she watched his eyebrows rise. He reached over to the slot at the end of the bed and pulled her chart out of it. As he looked over all the entries he narrowed his gaze and twisted his lips to one side. “I’ve been here many times for the same thing. You should have my whole history there.”
“Yes, uh huh,” the doctor said. “Has there been any change in your usual routine? Or your diet? Have you eaten or drank anything unusual, like wine, maybe?”
Dorina rarely drank, leaving it mostly to holidays and family get-togethers. “No, I haven’t drunk anything at all recently.” She glanced over at Mitch, who was listening to the conversation intently and nodding.
“Chocolate? Have you had any chocolate recently? Especially the dark, rich variety?”
She shook her head. “No, nothing like that either.” She tried to remember the last time she’d even eaten chocolate and decided that it must have been that previous Valentine’s Day. Mitch loved it and had treated her to some of it.
“Exposure to chemicals? Such as drying paint in a room that’s not too well ventilated?”
“No, not that I know of. There hasn’t been anything like that happening at work and my apartment was painted before I moved in.”
The doctor nodded again. With his smooth skin and soulful eyes, he looked much more serene than most stress-free medical professional Dorina had ever seen. “When was your last menses?”
She knew what he was doing: he was running down a list of common triggers, trying to take the holistic view of his possible treatment for her. “It was two weeks ago. All I can tell you is, I haven’t eaten or drank anything unusual or huffed chemicals and it’s not that time of the month. I just get these headaches and they about kill me. I need relief.” Her voice hit a creaking high note at the end of that sentence, as she hoped to convey the feeling of her searing pain.
The doctor glanced at the chart again. “It doesn’t look as if any of my colleagues have ever ordered a CT scan for you,” he said.
Dorina wasn’t sure if the company’s health plan covered most of that type of test or not. And she surely didn’t want to find out the hard way. “No,” she said quickly. “But the last one did a thorough check of my temples and my eyes and he said he didn’t think anything horrible was lurking in there.”
The doctor shook his head, barely perceptibly. “Looking at the chart and your vitals today, I’d have to say I’d agree. What type of a job do you have?”
“A stressful one,” she blurted. “I work for one of the big magazines doing ad administration and accounting.”
The doctor stepped back, to regard her scratching his chin. “That’s great,” he said. “Something you went to school for? Accounting and business?”
“Actually journalism. Sometimes I feel like I want to get a bumper sticker that says ‘I’d rather be writing.’”
That comment wrung a quick smile from the doctor’s lips. “Has everything been okay there? Any demanding new bosses or impossible deadlines or anything like that?”
In the past she had done most of the talking during her emergency room visits. She wasn’t sure how she felt about being asked so many questions. What was the big deal, she wondered. She worked, she paid her insurance through a before tax deduction and now she needed the doctor’s assistance. Hadn’t he been through eight years of schooling and a recitation of the Hippocratic Oath? Suddenly she felt queasy at the pit of her stomach to go with her intense head pain. “Well it’s stressful, sure,” she said. “But it’s what I signed up for. And I’ve been getting the headaches since high school.”
The doctor cocked his head to one side and asked her to repeat herself. He glanced at the chart again. “That long, huh?”
“Yes.”
“And you say they’re occurring about once a month, and it isn’t usually around the time of your menses?”
“No.”
He took a moment to think and then nodded deeply, as if he’d summed everything up inside his diagnosis seeking mind. “Tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to order a CT scan and write you something to help you with the pain you’re having.”
Not exactly what she wanted to hear. “A CT scan?” she repeated, anxiously. “But didn’t you ju
st say that you agree with the other doctors that nothing horrible is going on inside there?”
“Yes. But this would be one way to make absolutely certain, correct?”
Dorina could see the dollars flying out the window. At least she was going to get the medication she needed, she supposed, while watching Dr. Nolin scribble onto a prescription pad he’d pulled from one of his coat pockets. She watched him write the letters onto the blank area of the prescription pad, suddenly feeling a sharp pang of anxiety when the word seemed to short and filled with too many slashing angles to be “Demerol.” “You’re writing the script for the same type of pain meds that the other doctors did, right?”
“I’m writing one for prescription Motrin,” he said. “It should take the edge off.”
She felt as if someone had emptied a tumbler filled with boiling liquid on top of her head. “That’s not going to be strong enough! Not even Aleve or Advil comes close to touching the pain.”
Mitch started to speak, startling her. “In the past she’s always received the more narcotic types of painkillers,” he said. “It’s really all that works.”
The doctor nodded and calmly replied. “Yes, and they bring with them other problems, such as dependency, constipation, stress on the liver, and that’s just the beginning.” He whirled away from them as if he was punctuating the finality of his decision. “I’ll have the nurse give you some aftercare instructions.”
Dorina said “But doctor,” as she watched the man toss back the curtain and walk away from them.