A couple of weeks after bidding the dream team farewell in late February 2006, I’m obsessing about my new job (on top of everything else), though that’s nothing new. In seven years with the same global financial services company, I’ve held six jobs at three levels, in five functions, four departments, and three divisions. Officially, the jobs variously entailed consumer marketing, customer servicing, business-to-business sales, business development, and technology implementation. Fundamentally, all the work was, and is, the same: Know where the business needs to go. Pinpoint the problems and opportunities you can tackle to get there, given the time you’ve got and the resources you can wrangle. Craft explicit plans for doing so, enable and inspire everyone you can to support the plans, and adjust them along the way as needed.
A love of learning, thirst for achievement, and near-pathological drive for financial security have kept me moving at this breathless pace, as have the company’s frequent reorganizations and intensely competitive “up or out” culture. And there’s no lull in the hustle when one assumes a new role because, as one boss told me, “It takes six months to learn a job, but you’ve got to prove yourself in three.”
That’s why, at 11:00 a.m. on a Wednesday, I’m sitting at my dinner table, right elbow propped to keep my splinted hand elevated, with four résumés, a spiral notebook, and a blue ballpoint pen fanned out in front of me. I’d risen several hours earlier to allow time for one-handed bathing, dressing, breakfasting, splint washing, and dispensing of pills for the day—and to perform one hundred of my three hundred daily hand exercise reps. Now I really need to be napping. Instead, I’m preparing to conduct final-round interviews for two open positions on my new team.
I had posted the positions internally just before my accident, and they attracted scores of applicants, each of whom needed to be ranked and either interviewed or politely rejected, before the finalists could be identified. I wouldn’t normally have outsourced management of this process. But my new colleagues generously offered their help, I desperately need it, and I trust them. So I let them whittle the applicant pool down to a long list of serious contenders, interview the first-round candidates I selected from it, and pass me two excellent finalists for each job.
Studying their résumés awakens my excitement about my new department’s charter to develop new revenue streams for the company, and the small team I might build to pursue it with me. Job offers, strong performance reviews, and promotions are exciting, too, but my highest professional highs have involved solving interesting problems with great teams. There is a headiness to it, like flying on a large plane. You feel it struggling against gravity at takeoff and working hard to remain aloft at cruising altitude. But the dominant experience is of powerful momentum, strength in turbulence, and an inspiring view. A great team goes fast and far with a heavy load.
I think especially warmly of the young team of seven I managed in my last job. We were all well suited for our roles and charged with marketing the division’s most profitable product line—two undeniably important factors in the strong results we achieved. But we also enjoyed an extraordinary chemistry that increased what we could deliver for the business. We taught and encouraged each other and spoke candidly about what didn’t work. We let our personalities show, bantering and teasing throughout long, intense days at the office. We took interest in each other’s hobbies; explored our multiethnic, multinational, and religiously diverse backgrounds, mainly through food; and celebrated birthdays, marriages, and babies—the milestones of mainstream twenty- and thirtysomething lives. We respected and cared about each other.
This is not to say I was their friend. I wasn’t. In addition to leading strategy development, my job had been to navigate our team through the ever-changing commercial landscape: to coach and advocate for them, remove barriers to their success, and protect them from depressing political machinations at higher levels. I didn’t burden them with my own work problems and insecurities, or reveal any but the most family-friendly details of my personal life, which would have been unprofessional and unfair. Rather, I prided myself in keeping these, and many other aspects of my self and life, tightly under wraps—perversely so, in retrospect. The fact that I always stayed two glasses of wine behind the team at our social outings didn’t escape their notice or cheeky comment.
But I suspect we all knew our professional relationship would graduate to the personal once I was no longer their boss. And indeed, as soon as my old team learned of my accident through the company grapevine (always fast, usually true), they descended on my apartment to greet a thinner, paler, quieter, more tired and uncertain me than they had ever known. There, over pizza and a couple of hours, all the chemistry and caring that had made us so effective at work lifted my spirits tremendously, and I glimpsed a bridge between the isolated land of infirmity I occupied and the world I was working hard to return to.
You can’t engineer that kind of chemistry, but you can create the conditions that might spark and sustain it, starting by putting the right people in the right jobs. So, I spend a lot of time preparing interview questions for the final candidates for my new team—a couple of softballs about their prior experience to break the ice, but mainly chewy ones about situations they’d actually face in the job. That way they can show what they’d bring to it, whether or not that’s obvious from their résumé.
After two days of preparation, phone interviews, and soliciting feedback on the candidates from their current managers and my colleagues, I make my decision. I extend the offers and am delighted when they are immediately accepted. The winning candidates are talented, experienced, hardworking, and kind. I see mojo in our future. With a bit of direction from me and my gracious colleagues, they can start their jobs without me being in the office, and our new little venture will be that much closer to takeoff when I return. I feel relief and a surge of confidence that I’ve still got “it.” People choose the boss, not just the job, after all—especially when moving within our company, where everyone knows everything about everyone, or can find it out, and the strongest performers are spoiled for choice.
The next day, I’m a hot mess. The hiring process consumed so much energy and attention that I forgot to take all my naps and most of my meals. I am suffering mightily for the self-neglect, and all the tasks on my list for the day feel urgent, yet impossible. I try to review some work strategy papers but can’t hold their story line in my head. I need to call my health insurance company to find out why they rejected my latest OT claim but don’t feel lucid enough either to comprehend or fight their rationale. My kitchen is devoid of food I can easily prepare, and I can’t fathom how I will replenish it.
I feel one of my weekly weeps coming on—the short, mindless crying fits that help me blow off pent-up frustration and sadness—but soon find myself trapped in an epic sobbing and rumination loop instead. I cry because I am exhausted and hungry; because I have been shattered by a couple of light days’ work, though I used to have formidable stamina; and because I have caused this setback and let myself down.
Five minutes elapse, then ten, then fifteen. My head and stomach ache, and my hand burns, as always. I pace around my apartment, blowing my streaming nose in wads of toilet paper and taking slow, ragged breaths, but I can’t calm myself. I know the storm will eventually pass on its own but that the longer it lasts, the more demoralized I will feel, and the harder it will be to keep slogging away with the self-care. I need to call someone to pull me out of this loop, now.
Over years of solo living I’ve developed the ability to assess my remote support options almost automatically. Feeling some lack, I’ll think, What is it that I need—encouragement or someone to share in my happiness? Problem-solving or a nonjudgmental ear? Who in my inner circle does that well? Can they bear what I need to unload, without becoming worried or overwhelmed themselves? Will they have time to help? I also consider how much I have recently asked of the person, as I want to spread my need as thinly as possible. And then, there are very few people I will allow to witness a proper meltdown.
Now I flip open my Motorola Razr and scroll through the lime-green LED names on the tiny black screen until I reach Dad. Despite his precipitous mood swings, he remarkably never loses his shit when I need to lose mine. He’s a retired corporate soldier, so will understand my work concerns. And he is good at dispelling the fear and shame that often cling to the stickiest problems, complicating their resolution. Fifteen years earlier, I had worried how he would receive the news that I’d been laid off from my very first job out of college. “Ha! Congratulations, kid,” he’d said with a laugh. “You are now no longer the only working Fogg who hasn’t been laid off or fired. Don’t worry, it’ll only happen two or three more times in your life.” (He was right about that.) And then he helped me tailor my embryonic résumé to improve my chances of landing interviews.
I haltingly describe the day that is defeating me. “I’m so sorry, kid,” Dad says. “But you’ll land on your feet. You always do.” And he always says that, and I always think, Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, because nobody always lands on their feet. At least, not with the kind of sturdy, gymnastics-champion plant the expression brings to my mind. But maybe that’s not what he means by “land.” In any case, his positive outlook on my future helps when my own is hazy or bleak. Then he shifts into management consultant mode. “What are the three things you absolutely have to do, every day, to get better? Can’t be any more than three.” He speaks to the colleague in me, the determined, kindred spirit with solutions to offer. I find her and bring her forth, gently nudging Her Hot Mess-ness aside.
On Dad’s suggestion, I tape signs throughout my apartment: Live to fight another day and (1) Eat, (2) Sleep, (3) Hand exercises. They’re crude but effective reminders of what I must do to support tissue healing and nerve regrowth, or else I will struggle to perform the most basic tasks for the rest of my life. Complying means no more work while on medical leave, and ensuring I have time and energy for self-care once back on the job. And that means asking for help when the job demands more than I have to give. This is not my strong suit, as I learned early in my tenure managing that great team, just a couple of years ago.
The role was substantially bigger and more complex than my prior one, and transitioning into it, I’d become uncharacteristically overwhelmed in a way that made the team’s jobs harder. And, to my lasting chagrin, I failed to hide my frustration at what I perceived as my boss’s lack of support while I struggled. Weeks of building tension peaked in my midyear review, when she articulated my missteps with calm and painful candor. My fitness for the job wasn’t at issue, it was my approach to learning it. “Maybe we should have prepared you better,” she said, “but you really need to learn how to ask for help.”
I wanted to act on her feedback but didn’t know where to start. So I asked for, and was granted, an executive coach to help. The coaching process was excruciating, involving data from a battery of personality and leadership tests, and heaps of anonymous feedback from all my closest work contacts. The admiration and goodwill they expressed quickly slipped my mind, while their critiques weighed heavy and long, and for weeks when I awoke each morning, knots in my stomach announced that I was living in unhappy times, before I could remember exactly why.
Like psychotherapy, the coaching process exposed the many disadvantages of my Stoic-leaning worldview, and offered alternatives to it, both gentler and more realistic. I completed it with a more visceral understanding that my achievements weren’t the measure of my worth, that nobody accomplishes anything important on their own, and that (as Jen has been trying to drill into my head since I was seventeen) most people like to help. Why not give them the chance, then? With my team and boss’s support, I worked hard to put these insights into practice, and they paid off richly in strong business results and high team morale.
Recognizing parallels between that formative experience and the challenges I might face in following Dad’s advice, I realize I can again enlist Geri, the woman who coached me before. She responds immediately to my email, and in a subsequent ninety-minute phone conversation we hammer out tactics for handling the scenarios I’m most concerned about, my return-to-work plan chief among them.
Though my boss, Bill, didn’t ask for a return date in our brief conversation after the accident, I’d gotten antsy without one myself and later promised him I’d be back in six weeks. With my recovery rate impossible to predict and Dr. Vargas politely unwilling to guess it, I’d seized on six weeks as an outlandishly long medical leave that would surely suffice. Now that my body has vociferously rejected that plan, however, I have no better idea how to define a new, more accurate one. Fortunately, Geri does. “You can’t go back to work until you have at least four extra hours of energy at the end of every day,” she says firmly. “And the conversation with your boss is not ‘Sorry I can’t return until . . . ’; it’s ‘I’m psyched to get back, I’ll let you know as soon as I’m able, and here’s what I’ll need when I do.’ ” It’s a simple script, but I need it.
I decide that the conversation with my boss should be in person, like a breakup. So I make an appointment, dig some business casual out of my closet to wear, and catch a 2 train toward downtown Manhattan. I exit at Park Place, then head west along the northern border of Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center.
It is a massive building site today, loud and teeming with hopeful activity like the pages of a Richard Scarry children’s book. But whenever I look at it, I see the view from our office windows that tormented my colleagues and me when we returned to our building six months after the attacks: workers in high-visibility jackets, methodically raking through the wreckage-cleared dirt, searching for the last and smallest of human remains, leaving patterns like those in a Japanese rock garden. Whenever they found any, a siren signaled the discovery, and everyone on the site stood at attention while workers somberly walked the remains up the long ramp leading from the deep site foundations to the street. Watching from the office, we stood still, too.
I push through the revolving doors at our front entrance, walk through the main lobby past the memorial to employees killed in 9/11, ascend the escalator to the elevator lobby, and catch one to the forty-first floor. I’ve made some version of this trek thousands of times, but now I take it in with an outsider’s eyes. I also keep my head down and stick to the periphery. I know loads of people here, and as much as I would like to see some friendly faces, I don’t have the time or energy to keep repeating my story.
When I knock lightly on the doorframe of Bill’s office, he glances back at me from his computer against the wall, smiles warmly, and swivels around to his desk, gesturing for me to take one of the chairs opposite it. I’ve been apprehensive about our conversation, but my decision doesn’t surprise Bill, and he requires no explanation. “Many things in life are complicated, but this one is crystal clear,” he says in a soft European accent I have yet to place. “You have only one job to do, and that is to regain your health. Please do not think about anything else.” Though I’ve heard words to the same effect from many people, I feel a heavy emotional weight fall away when I hear them from him.
We spend the rest of our thirty minutes together talking about my accident, surgical repair, and recovery process. He appears so interested in the details—unlike many people, whose eyes start darting around at the word blood—that I ask if he wants to see my wound. “Ugh, God no!” he blurts out, pulling a face like a little boy gagging on brussels sprouts. This cracks me up because Bill never puts a word or hair out of place. And for the regulars at Bellevue, a glimpse of my wound is as tantalizing as artisanal chocolate. On my way out, I stop for a brief chat with a good friend who sits in the office next to Bill’s. She tells me later that he popped his head in after I left. “She’s different, isn’t she,” he’d said.
Released from my unreasonable demands for myself, I am giddy with relief, and my optimism grows, even in my dreams. One takes place in Paris, a favorite city since my sister and I first visited it in college. I arrive at the hotel I have booked as the sun sets, casting the grand, pale building in gold. The hotel clerk unapologetically informs me that no reservation exists in my name, and the property is fully booked—as are all the decent hotels in the city, due to some global industry conference taking place there that week.
“But I have a confirmation email!” I say, waving a crumpled paper in the air between us. He shrugs with his face. “Please, you have to do something for me.” I am a single woman. Night is falling. I can’t go wandering around, alone in the dark, looking for the last available room in Paris.
“Well,” he sighs, “there is one place I can put you for the night, but it’s not a real room and you absolutely must leave in the morning.”
“That’s fine. Anything is fine. Thank you so much!”
He leads me through a maze of corridors, opens a door, and gestures for me to go in. It is an ancient dungeon, complete with scuttling rats, rusty wrist irons draping fat stone walls, and little heaps of flea-infested hay scattered around the damp floor, where I am presumably to lay my head. I stare in astonishment and disgust. Just one night, I think. I can do it for one night. I begin rolling my suitcase in, then stop. No. No. I do not have to accept this. I can find something else, something safe, and better than this.
In my waking hours, I’m mostly able to hang on to that confidence, but it takes consistent effort. I follow the marching orders I’ve posted throughout the apartment: Eat, Sleep, Hand exercises. I call loved ones. I try to spot anxious thoughts weaseling into my mind and challenge them before they birth gloomy stories about my future. I know when to boot myself outdoors for a bit of fresh air and Brooklyn buzz. And as with life in more normal times, some days are just better than others.
In OT, Beth has me working to flatten out my hand, which she estimates will take about three weeks. She doesn’t revise the estimate when I tell her Dr. Vargas already started the process in my last clinic appointment; she just raises one eyebrow, Spock-like.
Splint off, right forearm resting palm upward on the OT table, I place the heel of my left hand against the vertical fingers of my right hand, close my left fingers over the right fingers, and give a nudge. The fingers don’t budge. I try a bit harder, to no avail. I start pushing in earnest, with the kind of force I would use to shove a box of books, and feel an intense, mechanical pain in my inner right forearm. I continue nonetheless and move them about a quarter inch. How had Dr. Vargas been able to move them more? And once I get them flat, my hand will still be useless, because the fingers don’t move individually and I can’t feel anything. Fuck.
Beth stops by, touching the fingertips of one hand to the table, tucking a sharpened pencil behind her numerously pierced ear with the other. “How’re you doing?”
I know she’s talking about the hand flattening, but the question brings to mind my meltdown and the necessity of postponing my return to work. I look at her, eyes welling as I consider how much to say in response. She sits down beside me.
“Tough week?” she asks quietly, so that the other patients at our table would have to strain to hear.
“Yeah.”
“We have a great psych department here. I could get you a referral, if you feel like talking to someone?”
“Nah, that’s OK, I already have one, actually. And it does help . . . I’m just . . . tired.”
Beth nods slowly for a moment, eyes trained on mine and squinting slightly. “Be right back,” she says, pushing off the table and out of her seat. She strides to the unoccupied receptionist’s desk and purposefully sifts through the administrative flotsam collected there, rejected by the clinical storage elsewhere in the room. “Do not try this at home,” she says, back at our table, sliding a fat rubber-grip pen and scrap of brown paper across the table to me. “Sign your name.”
She sits down, elbows on the table, chin on clasped hands, watching me. I look at her, eyebrows raised. Until now she has sternly forbidden active motion with my right hand.
“Go ahead.” She smiles. “It’ll be OK as long as you go slow and gentle. And only do it here. With me.”
Picking up a pen. Such a simple, fluid action in normal circumstances. Automatic. I think, I should jot that down, but I don’t have to think about how I’ll do it. I only have to shape the idea I want to capture, while my brain works in the background, translating my intentions into commands for the hand so that it follows along. But these days I have the dexterity of a garden rake, and lacking a lifetime of experience with it, my brain has not automated the process of manipulating the clunky tool. So I must consciously break the action of picking up a pen into tiny segments, like different frames of a stop-motion Claymation movie, and try to execute them as fluidly as possible.
I use my stiff fingers to hook the pen, drag it toward me, and orient the tip to four o’clock. I press my thumb and forefinger into it lightly and flip my hand palm upward. I tuck my middle finger under the pen, tipping its point up so that its weight rests on the bottom joint of my index finger, and I can scooch the tripod of my thumb, index, and middle fingers closer to the point. I rest the pinky side of my hand on the table, grip the pen a little tighter, place the point on the paper, and very slowly begin to guide it in the cursive loops, lashes, and switchbacks of my name. Because I can’t feel the pen, I watch the product of its every movement to check that my hand is doing what I mean it to.
And there she is: Rebecca D. Fogg.
My normal signature is a flourishy mess, reflecting the speed and thoughtlessness with which I usually execute it, and perhaps a touch of bravado and passive aggression as well. I will follow all your rules, Taxman, it says, but on this form I will cross the lines! The signature I have executed at Beth’s instruction, however, is contained, angular, and tentative, the inky lines alternately heavy and light because I cannot apply constant pressure while making the many micro-adjustments necessary to guide the point.
Still, it is easily recognizable as mine, and I feel a visceral sense of reunion with my self. My new hand works. It works, and it proves that some part of the connection between my mind and my hand has not been lost, because the shapes it produces are those it has always produced, ever since I was eight and my sister taught me to write my name in cursive on our playroom chalkboard. There will be no more active exercises for several weeks yet, but Beth has made her point. I am healing, and life won’t always feel so difficult and unpredictable.
I flatten my hand in four days instead of Beth’s predicted three weeks, and after easily overlooked progress measured in millimeters and decimal points by professional instruments, progress that I can see for myself accelerates. Beth releases me from my splint at home during the day, and enjoying the freedom to use my naked hand, albeit gently, I feel like a teenager acting recklessly with permission.
From hand flattening, I graduate to mobilizing one finger joint at a time. The exercises are tedious: Press left fingers down on the right index finger, just below the top joint, to isolate it. Now try to move that joint, and watch it do almost nothing, for days, until you’ve finally broken through some invisible wall and your effort results in the desired movement. Repeat the exercise with the top joints of middle, ring, and little fingers, and the thumb; then the middle joint of the index finger, and so on; bottom joint of index finger, and so on.
Mobile joints enable me to tackle composite movements—bending fingers toward palm, touching thumb to each finger pad, forming fists and hooks. Then fondling fist-sized pom-poms (because that’s all you’re doing, until you can finally close your digits enough to pick it up), then crumpling napkins on the table, then finally, picking up a cup and managing not to drop it. When I can build a whole stack of cups, I smile to myself thinking of the patient with the pin-tipped fingers, who had assured me on my very first day of OT that I would reach this milestone.
When Beth introduces strength exercises, I am right back at square one, this time feebly pressing putty into the therapy table, then lightly gripping it, then squeezing putties offering increasing levels of resistance and, at last, pushing my repaired tendons to their new limits with a spring-resistance gripper tool.
The final phase of the OT plan, an eclectic range of dexterity exercises, leverages all that I have gained—strength, a wide range of motion, and small, coordinated motor movements. I pinch clothespins on and off a line, dig coins out of putty and pick them up off the floor, grasp skinny pegs and place them into a pegboard while Beth times me. Sweet Jesus, I hate that last one, watching the single hand on Beth’s stopwatch spin round as I chase escaping pegs across the table, accidentally flicking them off it instead of sticking them into their holes, then standing up to chase them across the floor. It’s galling. Performing virtually the same task with Lite-Brite pegs (Google it) as a five-year-old, my only difficulty had been keeping my family’s pet guinea pig, who often escaped his cage, from eating them.
The issue is my complete lack of sensation. Of the five digits on my right hand, only the little finger and the side of my ring finger closest to it still have sensation, because the nerve that serves them was not severed in the accident. Except when they hurt, the rest of the digits are silent, like a dead radio, receiving and transmitting nothing about the outside world. As a result, my dexterity is abysmal—as if I am always working with winter gloves on.
The lack of sensation doesn’t worry me yet, though. While the Tinel sign—the tap-elicited tingling along the regenerating nerve—suggests the latter has only grown a few centimeters beyond the wound site, it is making good progress, and must reach its targets deep in my hand before I will experience its full benefit, whatever that may be. And by many other measures, I am healing well. The once-angry wound has settled down to a thin, pink seam, the sickly bruise that stained my inner forearm has disappeared, and with the swelling all but gone, my hand looks nearly as it did before the accident. My pain has diminished to the point that I only need hydrocodone at night; less burdened by pain and medication, I have much more energy and no longer require a daily nap.
Now I don’t just plod back and forth between home, Bellevue’s surgery outpatient clinic, and its Upper Extremity Occupational Therapy Room, the three planets in my trauma universe; I can engage in the world beyond them. After OT appointments, I sneak into the medical library on the hospital campus or go to the nearby medical bookstore and surreptitiously unwrap surgery texts, in search of keys for decoding Dr. Vargas’s report on my operation. Luxuriating in early April’s unseasonable warmth and sunshine, I trade smiles with strangers during my daily walks and linger on the promenade or in Brooklyn Bridge Park afterward to do hand exercises; make right-handed journal entries; and call Jen, my sister, or my parents to report on my progress and what I have learned about the science behind it. Selecting music on my iPod, the dial clicks right past Bach and lands on Prince, seemingly of its own accord.
This period brings a subtle shift in my experience of Bellevue, too. Though still a patient, I now possess knowledge and confidence enough to contribute to the community that has given me so much. In clinic, I can quickly recap the salient details of my case for residents rotating onto my team who haven’t had a chance to read my entire medical record. In OT, I can encourage new patients the way other patients did me when I first arrived. I am careful not to tell them everything will be OK, because if there’s anything we in the Bellevue Upper Extremity Occupational Therapy Room know, it’s that life is dangerous and uncertain. But I can greet them, witness their efforts, and cheer their successes.
As for my own rehabilitation, Beth has started saying, “That should make you feel more confident about returning to work,” whenever I achieve a new milestone. And one day in mid-May, when a stranger in the Bellevue elevator tells me they’ve seen me coming and going for weeks and that I look like I have “turned a corner,” I know Beth is right. It’s time to plan my return to work, though the thought still makes me uneasy.
That weekend, I slowly wake up at my dining table with peanut-buttered wheat toast and a big mug of espresso with hot milk. Eyes on the novel that I hold open with my left hand, I pick up my mug with my right and take a sip of the brew, an affordable luxury I buy from a century-old Greenwich Village roaster. I let it pool in my mouth for a moment, as I often do to savor its strong, smooth flavor, before swallowing and replacing the mug on the table so that I can turn another page. This time, however, I pause after swallowing, and immediately take another sip. There is something different about the ritual today. I concentrate on the taste of the coffee. No, not that. Then what? Scanning my consciousness, I know the difference is sensory but, strangely, not what it is. And then I do. Today, for the first time in about a hundred days, I can feel the warmth of the coffee cup in my right hand.
It’s not warmth the way I used to feel it; it’s some new sensation, but still warmth, and I’m elated. It means that some of the temperature-registering axons in my median nerve have successfully sprouted growth cones and crept all the way from my wrist through my hand to reach their targets. And that means that axons in other types of neurons—those that trigger sensations of pain and vibrations and tell me the position of my hand in space—might, too. Here is the best sign yet that I will regain enough sensation to keep my hand safe, and to do the precise and delicate work that my independence depends upon.
I jump out of my chair and go to the kitchen to run my hand under hot water. Yup, that’s warm, too. I turn on the cold water—cold sensation is back, too! I open up the freezer and squeeze a bag of frozen peas. Ouch! Burning, burning cold. I’m astonished by these developments, and sentimentally imagine that this must be what it’s like to feel a baby’s first in utero movements. (Later, my unsentimental mom friends correct me. Baby’s first movements just feel like gas, apparently.) I’d just told my boss I’d return to work the following week. Finally, I feel ready to go.