Room 23

by Kavita Basi

  When my masseuse, Katie, came to see me, her eyes filled with tears. I could see that she was trying to be strong. She was usually chirpy and upbeat, but seeing me this way—my emaciated frame and all my bruises—clearly shocked her.

  I sobbed the whole time she massaged my back and legs.

  My yoga instructor, Ana, also got upset when we saw one another. We didn’t do any meditation or yoga; we just sat and talked and hugged.

  I wanted to blame myself for what happened. “Did I do something wrong?” I asked her. “Why did this happen? I was so healthy.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she told me. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  It was a relief to be able to talk with her and know I had her support. Even if I would never understand what had happened to me, she helped me acknowledge that I had to learn to accept it.

  “I’m miserably unhappy with my short hair,” I said to my friend Katie.

  “I think we can fix that,” she said. “You need to meet with my friend who specializes in extensions. She’ll come to your house and take notes and measurements. She gets real Russian hair made to order.”

  I paused, considering this option. “Will it touch my stitches?”

  She shook her head. “It’ll be a clip-on piece, so there won’t be any contact with your skin or scalp.”

  Everyone I’d reached out to was so kind. I could feel how important it was to be around positive people. Just having made these small steps since therapy, I could feel my self-confidence coming back.

  Chapter 10

  I felt immense pressure to return to work as soon as possible. Since Deepak was no longer working, I felt I really had no choice. I was also feeling pressure from other people who thought being at work would help me. I wasn’t sure if my mind and body were ready, but in order to feel normal again, I needed to get a sense of routine back in my life.

  I wasn’t able to sleep the night before my first day back at work. I was excited and anxious, but I knew I had to try. I got up at 5:00 a.m. and began to get ready.

  Returning to the job where I had worked for over twenty years was a strange feeling. Walking into our building was anything but normal. I felt like it was the first day of class in a new school, except I knew everyone. And I was so happy to see them all. The social part of being back at work was something I’d sorely missed. Now I was in the middle of all these familiar faces—yet it was different now. I was different now.

  My desk had been completely cleared while I was away from work, so my boss escorted me to a large showroom, saying, “You can work from here over the next few months.” She handed me a box full of my belongings, along with a sheet of paper. “Here’s a list of new customers for you to tackle.”

  Left alone in the showroom, I tried to be brave. I tried to make sense of how I was feeling. But everything was overwhelming. As I looked at my tasks, I knew what I had to do, but I couldn’t make sense of how to do them. It was as if I were sitting in front of a giant jigsaw puzzle that I needed to put back together: everything was jumbled.

  I started by pulling my things out of the box to set up my workspace: framed photos from my desk, files, notebooks, and some stationery. At first everything was okay, but then I pulled out some paperwork dated just before my brain hemorrhage. Seeing the date upset me. Being back in the office upset me, too. I looked around and felt so alone in this big room with this box next to me containing all my hard work. I had forgotten so much time in between everything.

  My palms grew sweaty, and suddenly I felt hot and was unable to breathe, my anxiety increasing rapidly. I quickly grabbed my purse and rushed into the ladies’ room, where I dove into a cubicle and closed the door. I took a few deep breaths and cried.

  Why did all of this happen? Why is everything so difficult? Why have I lost so much memory?

  I didn’t want anyone at work to see me this way. I was in a position of authority and I didn’t want to look weak. After I’d calmed down I washed my hands and looked in the mirror. I wiped my eyes with tissue, tidied up, and went back to my desk. I got back to work setting up my desk, got some new stationery, and made lists of what I needed to tackle. I started a diary like the one I had at home and filled out an A3 desk calendar so I could see my tasks clearly in front of me each day.

  I began to calm down.

  Throughout the day, and between meetings, my colleagues trickled in one by one to say hello.

  “I’m so happy you made it through,” one said.

  “We’re all wishing you the best of luck,” another said.

  I hadn’t realized how much my colleagues respected and missed me. Their kind words were a bright spot in an otherwise difficult day. I felt wanted and happy, though in just a couple hours I was exhausted. My job was fast-paced, and required quick turnaround. I was used to selling something one minute and moving on to something else the next. Sometimes it was five or six things at once. Fashion changed rapidly, but I excelled under pressure; that was how I’d gotten to where I was in my company.

  But now I was faced with memory loss. I had a list of new customers I’d never worked with before, and I couldn’t remember their names—on top of which I generally forgot what I was doing after five minutes. My multitasking skills were gone. When more than one person talked in the meeting at once that day, I missed what people were saying. Everything was taking me five times longer to do than it had in the past. I misinterpreted figures. I couldn’t read spreadsheets or put them together. Finally, my memory failed when I tried to convert a cost to a sell price.

  I was too embarrassed to ask the junior members of my team or my reporting line; I was afraid they would think I was incompetent. I called Deepak in a panic. I knew he would help me.

  “How do I convert a cost to a sell price?” I asked him. “I don’t remember the formula.”

  He gently walked me through it, and then we hung up and I got back to work.

  I felt so alone and confused, but I didn’t want to fail. I’d been through so much. I knew this was nothing—that I just had to fight to get through this, allow my brain to relearn things . . . at its own pace.

  I made notes and began a file I could refer to going forward. I knew I’d be forgetting plenty of things in the future.

  Before my brain hemorrhage, the pressure of work was a strong influence on my life. As a buyer in the fashion industry, I faced a lot of challenges, especially as an importer. I loved my job, but the traveling and pressure were killing me even before my brain tried to do it. The journeys were often tiring and long. I could see that work was affecting my health, and knew that most illnesses are caused by stress.

  Work was such a big part of me, though. I was more afraid of life being boring than I was of having an overly fast-paced life. Secretly, I found the stress exciting. I didn’t know how to move away from it, even though I knew it was killing me.

  “Did anyone see the X Factor this weekend?” I asked in the car one trip, trying to spark conversation with my team on one of our drives to kill time.

  My attempt only took up twenty minutes, and we had far to go.

  Traffic, traffic, and more traffic.

  I checked my emails. I had fifty new ones from the Far East on my phone. I decided to try to get some work done before the meeting.

  Have all the prices been sent through? What are the delivery dates? Have they found the fabric for the $500,000 order? Are my meetings set for the next week? So many questions rolled through my mind. I had to make a new list every day, but it always had the same things on it. If I didn’t manage $2 million in orders today, I might as well quit. I hadn’t had an order in four weeks and couldn’t keep doing this weekly eight-hour journey without some kind of return.

  After our third meeting of the day, I got another chance to check my email. Now there were 250 emails. I checked my watch. It was almost 3:00 p.m. I could either sit for a late lunch or try to finish the next meeting and head home early . . .

  Nourish myself or work?

  I
chose to finish work.

  We stopped off at the service station and I told my team they had ten minutes to get what they needed since I didn’t want to get stuck in traffic. On our way back, I received a message that the $2 million–dollar deal was confirmed.

  “Turn up the radio,” I said. “I want to celebrate!”

  It was that rush—that feeling of satisfaction—that I couldn’t give up. And I enjoyed my colleagues in the industry as well. It wasn’t always about business; I was friends with my buyers. I knew about their personal lives. We talked about TV, we gossiped, we discussed the news, partners, everything. I respected my colleagues and I worked hard to gain their respect as well.

  Just as I had been my first day back at work, I was petrified the evening before my first business trip. I was afraid of going alone. I’d already traveled with my family by train and plane, of course, but traveling for work was different.

  I was reminded of my first business trip to Taiwan. I was just nineteen at the time, and my uncle sent me alone. That first night in Taiwan I cried and cried because I was alone in a strange place. I felt so homesick. But after conquering that fear I was able to travel anywhere in the world alone without fear.

  I needed that same strength now. I had done these trips hundreds of times. I tried to stay strong and not panic, but I tossed and turned all night. What if I missed the train? What if something bad happened?

  Normally I got up at 6:45 a.m. for this trip, but I got up at 5:45 a.m. that day just in case.

  I had a large sample bag to take with me and feared I wouldn’t have the strength to carry it—and I was afraid to ask someone to help me because of what had happened when we were to meet Deepak in London on our way to Spain.

  I booked another porter anyway, hoping I wouldn’t get the same man, and hoping whomever I did get would believe I needed the help.

  My journey to the station was full of panic. I had forgotten the route to get there; luckily, Deepak was with me. I knew it was normal to forget things with my condition, but I’d done this trip so many times before. All I could remember was the glass building I knew stood near the station. I tried to find it but I couldn’t. Everything seemed to be going wrong. This wasn’t like me. I’m a composed, organized person, I told myself. I can do this.

  This time, fortunately, a porter was there to assist me to the platform and onto the train. He even informed the next stop about my needs so there would be someone there to help me when I arrived.

  The scenery from the train was beautiful, something I’d never taken the time to notice before. I met a lovely woman on the second train. She was from Liverpool, where I’d lived for eight years after getting married. We talked about places we knew and areas I used to visit, like the neighborhood café I used to go to with my husband and daughter for Sunday morning breakfast, where we’d read the newspaper and magazines while sipping on English Breakfast tea.

  I couldn’t believe I’d never taken the time to enjoy the scenery on a business trip, let alone have a conversation with a stranger. In the past I’d always been deep in emails or sleeping. I felt different now—much more open, without a care but to enjoy my life and my work. I didn’t know if I would get my huge orders or business on this trip, but I knew I would try my best and not get upset by the outcome. I was prioritizing work in a different way now. It no longer consumed me in the way it had before. And I really liked this new change, this new me.

  One of my cousins had been over for dinner just before my trip.

  “Am I different from before?” I asked her.

  “I never saw you before. You were always too busy,” she said. “I was expecting you to cancel dinner tonight, and when I got here I was surprised you’d made all the food!”

  I thought about this.

  “I like the new you,” she added. “I like that you have time for me now.”

  On my way back home I was so exhausted I fell asleep on the train. I woke up when something touched my head and made me jump. A young woman had collapsed next to me on the floor. Someone offered her a bottle of water. A kind woman was talking gently to her.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “The train is so warm and stuffy I was finding it difficult to breathe,” the young woman said. She got up off the floor and sat on a chair.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She nodded yes.

  I appreciated how quickly people had helped her. I wondered if every person would be compelled to help in a situation like this one. This made me think again about how we don’t always know what someone is going through on the inside, in spite of what they may look like.

  I started working with a new team—a collective group of creative people from different parts of the global company—to bring about new ideas and help grow the business. I’d thought about the psychology of how people shop, or would shop in the future, and pitched an idea for sustainable clothing that I’d been working on with one of my designers, Amanda. I wanted to design a range of products for dual use, like work clothes that could double as workout clothes. But the idea needed to span a full range of products. A working mom spends a lot of her time at work, so her home life is also at work. And in the future, I believed, an increasing number of people would live lives in which their work and home lives were fully integrated.

  I found it difficult to stay positive at work under the pressure of maintaining targets. Motivational pressure was good, and a tactic I understood well, but negative pressure was no longer good for me. I understood that senior management was always under immense stress, but some of that stress often filtered down to the rest of the team in the wrong way. I had to learn to step back and just analyze what was going on—to recognize what the issues were and deal with them.

  At one point I was asked if my priorities had changed.

  This was an absolute given.

  My priority was now me. Everything else came second. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t give my all to work. I loved my job. I put everything I had into everything I did, because that’s who I am.

  I had a hard time getting my colleagues to understand that I wasn’t the same person I’d been before. There was no going back. I wasn’t able to process information in the same way. I tired more quickly and needed more time to do things. And just because I made a spelling mistake or typed the wrong date wasn’t necessarily because of my brain hemorrhage—we all make mistakes.

  At one point, a rumor began circulating through the office. Someone said that I was upset about a recent decision and had had a nervous breakdown! I was baffled why someone would say this when everyone knew I had neurological problems from my illness.

  This was why Deepak had stopped allowing visitors to the hospital toward the end of my time there. A few work colleagues who came to see me thought I looked fine, and therefore thought that what I’d been through wasn’t that bad. They then told others. They thought because there were no visible signs of my illness, I wasn’t in that bad a shape.

  It’s not in my nature or vocabulary to present myself as a victim in any way. But I knew my illness was severe enough that I needed to respect my body’s need to recover. And it was frustrating to have to defend myself. It reminded me of that old mentality in the business world that people are only working if you see them in the office.

  Not everyone doubted the pace of my recovery. When a colleague from Hong Kong who helped with the work community website came to visit me at work, she seemed to get it.

  “Can I put your story and video blogs on our website?” she asked. “I want everyone to see the extent of what you’ve been through and get a chance to see your recovery process.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  We had a great conversation about how businesses are changing. The conversation was insightful and affirming; it made me realize I wasn’t the only one thinking about new ideas in the workplace.

  I shared a project I was working on with her before she left: I told her I had started to look at the social aspects
of the next generation and what they were influenced by. I thought the idea could spread worldwide.

  “I’d like to post an article on that,” she said.

  I felt proud of what I was doing and achieving, even if I was moving slower and working fewer hours. I was actually more productive now than I had been before; the quality of what I was doing was much higher. I believed in my ideas and self with a lot more strength, and I’d grown more ambitious.

  The idea I shared with my colleague that day was one I’d presented to the board a couple of years earlier. The idea had been well received but not really understood.

  We both hoped things were different now, and the idea would take off.

  I began to notice a huge gap between management and staff at work, and realized that we needed social change in our work environment. I had been just as guilty of this as other players in management before, but I felt so different now. I was looking after myself in a much healthier way, in both mind and body. I had begun to bring my lunch to work to ensure I was eating nutritious food every day.

  One beautiful day I decided to sit outside and have lunch with my design team. As I sat there, taking in the warm weather and enjoying time with my team, I realized that, in my twenty-one years with the company, I’d never sat outside to have lunch with coworkers. I’d usually just followed what others in management did, taking five minutes at my desk, not even tasting my food, like eating was a chore. But we all spent so much time together; why not make lunchtime an enjoyable part of our lives? I couldn’t understand why I’d never done this before.

  I decided that day that I should also connect with my team on social media. Why not? I no longer cared about the hierarchy.

  On another sunny day I forgot to bring my lunch and decided to go to MediaCity, a mixed-use TV/film studio and property-development area where there were plenty of restaurants.