Brooks and I kept seeing each other every day.
One morning shortly before my twenty-first birthday on July 18, I got up and looked in the mirror. If I had looked more closely at my reflection, I would have noticed that I didn’t look normal. A weird yellow hue colored my skin. I felt tired, truly exhausted. If I’d been honest with myself, I would have admitted something was wrong, because I rarely felt exhausted. I took the right vitamins and generally ate clean. Another wave of nausea rolled around in my stomach, but I ignored it. That night Brittany was flying into the city with her boyfriend, and we were all set to celebrate our birthday together. Nothing was going to stop us.
This sounds weird to say . . . but it’s an important detail when I think about it now. When I went to the bathroom that morning, my stool was strangely dark, like I’d eaten a full tub of black licorice the night before, and I hadn’t had anything like that.
It might have been dread working its way through my body—that feeling of not being true to myself. Or it might have been some other sort of poison, something purely physical. If I had been listening to my body more closely, I might have been able to discern that I hadn’t been feeling like myself—or acting like myself—the entire summer. Some part of my inner physicality was paying for the tension. I was going downhill, although I didn’t know it just yet.
Truth was, I wasn’t listening to myself. I wasn’t listening to anyone at all.
I felt another wave of nausea but ignored it again. I threw on a fun tank top and a cute pair of jean shorts, grabbed my sunglasses, and headed out the door to meet Brooks.
CHAPTER 15
A Message I Needed to Hear
Lauren
“Your lips look all white, Lo,” Brittany said. “Are you wearing sunscreen ChapStick or something?”
“Nope, not me.” I picked up my purse and glanced into the mirror by my apartment’s front door. “C’mon, hurry up. We’ll be late.”
It was Tuesday evening, four days before our twenty-first birthday. Brittany had just arrived in New York, and we were all set to celebrate together. Her boyfriend would fly in a couple of days later to join us, but tonight it was just the girls. We were meeting up with two girlfriends at a place near the Hudson for a special night out. I did feel woozy, like maybe I should lie down for a while. But I kept my mouth shut. There was no way I was going to spoil this night for Brittany and me.
The restaurant on the Hudson offered a fabulous view of the river. I ordered a chicken salad and picked at some breadsticks, but honestly I wasn’t hungry. I went to the bathroom several times and kept thinking I was going to be sick, but nothing came up. I hadn’t been drinking, so I knew that wasn’t the culprit.
About 10:30 p.m. our friends left, and Brittany and I boarded the subway to head back to my apartment. The subway car was packed. I clutched the rail as the train lurched forward, and everything began to spin. I’d never fainted in my life, but I felt like I was going to pass out.
“You need to stand up!” Brittany had snapped into her motherly role and was speaking brusquely to someone occupying a subway seat. “My sister’s not feeling well. She needs to sit.”
I took the seat and put my head between my legs. “I’m okay, Brittany. I just need some air.”
At the next stop we got out. We were at Times Square, a busy station, and I looked up at the flight of concrete stairs in front of me, wondering how I would ever be able to climb them. They led up out of the subway to fresh air. I took a shaky step toward them. Then another.
“Lo?” I heard a voice say. Maybe it was Brittany, but I wasn’t sure. “Lo!” This time the voice sounded far away.
Everything grew dark.
When I woke up, I was on my back on the concrete, still underground. People’s faces seemed to float above me. Feet walked straight past. Brittany knelt by my shoulders. She held her cell phone to her ear, calling an ambulance.
“I’m okay, Brittany, really,” I said. “I just fainted.” But she’d already flashed into action, becoming a warrior for me. My legs felt wobbly as I tried to stand. My stomach flip-flopped. How was I ever going to get to the street? Brittany would never be able to carry me that far. I sat down again and prayed one word: Help.
“Ma’am, you okay?” came a voice from above.
I looked up. A young couple, maybe in their early thirties, stood next to me. “Let me go get a bottle of water for you,” the woman said. “There’s got to be a machine around here somewhere.” The man was talking with Brittany.
“Lo, he’s going to carry you upstairs,” Brittany said. I nodded.
This stranger—I so wish I had caught his name—carried me up two flights of stairs. The woman brought me water. “We’re going to be praying for you,” she said, which is something I hadn’t heard before on the streets of New York. Then they were gone, vanished into the crowd.
A few minutes later the ambulance arrived. I kept telling the paramedics I was all right, but Brittany insisted they check me. They took me to an emergency room in a part of town I didn’t recognize. The doctor on call figured I was either pregnant or drunk and gave me a urine test but not a blood test (which would have answered a ton of questions, we discovered later). He concluded I was dehydrated and told me to go home, get some rest, and drink plenty of fluids.
Dana Crawford was in New York just then, helping her son move into a new apartment, and she met us at the emergency room and filled out the paperwork for me. It felt good to have someone we knew so well close by. She made sure I was all right, and I really was feeling better by then—or at least that’s what I told everyone. It all felt so silly. Imagine me fainting like that. Brittany and I took a cab home. I drank lots of water and ate some watermelon and went to bed.
For the next few days I basically just functioned. I wasn’t feeling well a lot of that time, but our twenty-first birthday—something you wait your whole life for—was coming up. There was no way I could let this milestone pass by uncelebrated.
On the afternoon of our birthday, Brittany and I were out for lunch at a rooftop plaza, and I was feeling terrible again. I called my mom in Dallas about 1 p.m. She went online and found a travel doctor who was able to see me at 5 p.m. that same day. Brittany and I took the subway to his office. It felt hard to walk, and I kept looking for a place to sit down. The walls of the doctor’s waiting room were painted a swirly green. A painting hung opposite from where we sat. Boats riding the waves. Ships with tall masts. Their sails flapped in the ocean wind. I blinked. The sails were actually flapping. Moving with each gust of the storm.
“Do you have an eating disorder?” the doctor asked inside his office.
“No, I love eating, and I hate throwing up.” I remember my words exactly.
The doctor was kind and ran some tests but said there was nothing that could be done until the results came back. In the meantime he ordered me to take it easy. I agreed, at least in spirit.
I went home, took a shower, and lay in bed with my towel on. I felt too ill even to get dressed. I felt as though I might pass out but didn’t say anything. Brittany brought me a basket of berries I had in my refrigerator. I ate the entire basket and felt a little better.
The wheels of celebration were already set in motion, and since I felt on the upswing, Brittany, her boyfriend, Brooks, and I went out that night. At four in the morning I found myself in Brooks’s apartment with just the two of us in his room. We were lying on his bed, kissing, and my heart was racing.
“You are so-o-o-o-o beautiful,” he whispered in my ear. His hands started wandering.
“Brooks.” That was all I said. His name. I couldn’t think of the right word then, the word I wanted to say. It was “no.” But no other words would come out of my mouth.
“Wow, your heart is just pounding, Lauren. Are you nervous about this? Really, there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s the best thing in the world. And you are so-o-o-o-o-o beautiful.”
There were those same words. I’d heard them from him before. I
thought I had already made myself clear on the subject. The answer was still no.
“It’s okay,” he added. “Really. You’re so special to me.”
“You’re special to me too,” I murmured, but I stopped kissing him.
“So what’s wrong? Everything okay?”
I sat up. The walls in his bedroom were moving. “I don’t feel very good, Brooks. Really. I just want to go to sleep now. Is that okay?”
Brooks nodded.
At ten the next morning I took a taxi home to my apartment. My stomach hurt. My head ached. Brittany and her boyfriend had gone to a museum and left a note. I climbed into bed and fell into an unsteady sleep.
An hour later the phone rang. The voice on the other end sounded strangely insistent. “You need to come in—right now!” It was the doctor’s office. I called Brittany. She came back and got me, and we went to the doctor’s office together.
“Lauren, this is serious stuff,” the doctor said. “The results came back, and you’re bleeding internally. Your red blood count is one-third of what it’s supposed to be. You’re suffering from malnutrition, and until we can figure out exactly why you’re bleeding, we’ll need to replace all this blood you’ve lost. That means a blood transfusion first thing tomorrow morning.”
Bleeding internally?
That’s why my energy levels had been so low. Why I had fainted. Why my heart had been racing. Why my stools had been so dark. My body was passing blood.
I called my parents and explained the situation. “I’ll be there immediately,” Mom said. She bought a ticket and within hours was on a plane to New York. My dad rented a hotel room for all of us. He called and told us to meet Mom at the hotel room. By now it was obvious something was wrong with me. Everything that was supposed to be red on me was either white or yellow. My lips, my cheeks—nothing looked normal. At the hotel I lay on the bed, and Brittany lay next to me. My body began to feel numb. It felt hard to lift my arms.
“Lo, you are so warm,” Brittany said. “I can literally feel the heat coming off you.” Brittany’s boyfriend went out and bought a thermometer. My temperature was 104.
When Mom arrived, Brittany was on the phone with the doctor. My mom took one look at me and then took the phone from Brittany.
“My daughter can barely move,” Mom said. “We need to get her to the ER immediately.” The travel doctor told her to take me to Mount Sinai Hospital as quickly as possible.
By then I was out of breath and struggling to talk. I couldn’t walk by myself. The bellman brought a wheelchair up to the room and took me down to a cab. It felt so good to have Mom there. Inside the cab, I lay against her. She carried me into the ER.
Hours ticked by. A regular hospital room wasn’t available, so for much of that time I lay on a bed in a big ward with a curtain around me. The emergency room was absolutely jam-packed, loud and chaotic, and there wasn’t much privacy. One poor woman nearby threw up every five minutes. Another person was screaming. Medical staff began to give me blood transfusions, one right after the other, four pints total. Night came, and I slept a bit, off and on, but there was no place for Mom to lie down. I could see that she was growing exhausted. She tried to doze in a chair, but that never works well. We tried to be patient. She prayed with me a lot.
We stayed in the emergency room at Mount Sinai for eighteen hours. Finally a regular hospital room opened up, so they moved me in there. Another patient was in the room along with me. Mom stayed on a chair in the corner of the room. Back at home, Dad was busy making phone calls, trying to figure out the next steps. The best plan was for me to go back to Dallas, to doctors and hospitals we were familiar with, but we were told that I wasn’t able to fly until my hemoglobin levels came up.
Over the next couple of days the staff at Mount Sinai did every test they could think of—a colonoscopy, an endoscopy, a CT scan. Something may have gotten nicked in my upper intestine. No one was too sure. But one thing was certain: they needed to stop the bleeding—and quickly. People with a red blood cell count as low as mine don’t live too long, they said.
I don’t remember much from that time. Mostly I tried to sleep. I remember Mom murmuring to me once how pale I looked—absolutely colorless. I remember she braided my hair and put some blush and lipstick on me. It was so sweet of her, and the kind gesture made me smile. Still, no diagnosis came. I remember being so hungry. An IV pumped fluids into my arm, but because of all the tests they were running, I wasn’t allowed to eat for the first two and a half days.
Finally on the fourth day in the hospital, my hemoglobin levels had risen enough so I could fly. Dad made reservations, and Mom and I boarded a plane for Dallas. That was the abrupt end of my summer in New York. Brittany had packed up my apartment a few days earlier. She’d brought all my stuff home with her.
Maybe it shows how out of whack my priorities were just then, but even though I was at death’s door, my thoughts turned to Brooks. I found it weird that I hadn’t heard from him since the early morning at his apartment. For the past month we’d been talking all the time, texting by the hour, hanging out with each other every day. Now there was nothing but silence.
I sent him a text. “I was bleeding internally, and they had to give me a blood transfusion.” I expected sympathy, a caring word, at least a question about how I was doing. A guy who cared deeply for me would ask how I was doing and worry that I was going to be okay, wouldn’t he?
“OMG,” Brooks texted back.
One phrase. That was the sum total of his response. No follow-up call. No e-mail. No message on Facebook. Nothing. Maybe I hadn’t explained myself clearly enough. Maybe there was something more I should have done.
I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. But there was a word flitting through the back of my mind that I’d heard somewhere. High school maybe. The implications of the word were just dawning on me. I couldn’t remember it exactly, because I’d never encountered it before, never seen it lived out in real life. It meant a guy who’s only interested in one thing, and when he doesn’t get that, he dumps you. There is no real friendship with this guy. No real caring or compassion.
Player.
That was the word. There was no way to sugarcoat the truth. Brooks had discarded me like yesterday’s trash.
Back home in Dallas, the doctors at Baylor checked me out. They said I needed more tests, but thankfully I didn’t have to be admitted again. For the next several weeks I went back and forth from home to the hospital. I had another CT scan, and I swallowed a PillCam—a miniature camera that checks your entire digestive tract. All the tests came back inconclusive.
But I wasn’t okay. I knew I’d blown it in so many ways. My physical health was shot. My spiritual health was shot. I felt like the prophet Jonah being digested in the belly of the whale. I’d run away from God and been thrown over the side of a ship, only to be eaten by an unnamed monster. I couldn’t even hope to be vomited out on dry land.
Desperately, I longed for someone to tell me I was going to be okay. That’s all I wanted to hear—one short, specific phrase: You’re going to be okay, Lauren. That was it, but nobody was telling me that. My doctors and family were all being truthful. I wasn’t going to be okay—something was seriously wrong with me. It’s not that I wanted anybody to lie to me. I just wanted to hear one credible word of encouragement. I didn’t know how to ask for it. I didn’t even know who to ask.
God, I prayed. I know things haven’t been the best between you and me lately. And I’m sorry about that. I truly am. Please—somehow—let me know I’m going to be okay.
One afternoon while a test was being done, I sat and looked out the window. The summer sky, normally clear and blue, was overcast, hazy, and darkening. I deserved God’s anger. I knew that. I’d blatantly thumbed my nose at him. I’d told God I knew better. I hadn’t been true to myself or what I knew was right, and I’d said and done things I deeply regretted.
I had my laptop with me, and right then I felt a sudden urge to check Facebook.<
br />
I logged on, and there was a private message from Cindy Froese, a friend of my parents from church. Cindy and I knew each other only from a distance. I knew she was a solid woman of God, but I didn’t know much more about her than that. Her message was short and to the point. No preamble or introduction.
“Lauren,” she wrote. “I can’t exactly tell you why, but just this moment the Lord has so strongly laid on my heart a specific message for you: You’re going to be okay.”
It was the language of grace.
I shut my computer and wept.
CHAPTER 16
Reconciled
Lauren
They never did find out what was wrong with me.
My internal bleeding stopped as suddenly as it had started. My red blood cell count began to bounce back to normal. To this day, I’ve never experienced anything like that again, and whatever went wrong with me that summer in New York remains a mystery.
In the fall of 2009, I started back at Dallas Baptist University. It felt good to be back among a community of close friends who knew me and supported me. I began reading my Bible more and walking closer with God. I paid more attention to my physical needs too. I’d always eaten healthfully, but I renewed my commitment to eat clean. I began to experiment with various foods, paying attention to how they affected my body’s energy levels. I cut out most sugar, gluten, and red meat, and ate almost solely fresh vegetables, fruits, and lean protein. Avocado made a good substitute for butter, Greek yogurt for sour cream, and stevia for sugar. My favorite foods became crunchy kale salads, grilled sweet potatoes, and blackened, lightly-oiled Brussels sprouts.
That September I flew to New York to cover Fashion Week again. This time I didn’t sense the Lord telling me not to go to the city. I didn’t see anybody there I shouldn’t be seeing. I just attended the shows, then went to coffee shops by myself to write. I began thinking ahead to the next summer and lined up several interviews to explore more internships. The good people at Teen Vogue talked with me, as did the folks at People StyleWatch magazine. But nothing seemed quite right. By the time I flew home, I had no idea what to do except continue on with the next steps at school.
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