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“I’ll be fine, Roger. I promise.”
And I am fine.
For the most part.
The ride back to the hotel is long and unpleasant. Each bump in the road seems to rattle my brain and make the pain of the headache worse, and as my vision starts to go fuzzy around the edges, I worry about getting into the hotel and up to my room. It’s been a while since I’ve had a migraine this bad; sometimes I have mild ones that I can coach through and don’t impair my vision. Other times, usually when my hormones fluctuate with my cycle, I have debilitating migraines like this one.
This one that finds me laying on the bathroom floor with my cheek pressed to the cold tile. Is a hotel bathroom floor the best place to be laying? No. But after heaving up the contents of my stomach, I just want to lay here for a minute before making my way to my bed. The ice pack from the team trainers is fully melted and I don’t feel up to traversing the hotel for ice, so after a while I wet a couple of extra washcloths from mybathroom and put them in the small refrigerator in Max’s side of the room.
Max’s bed isright there.
I drop into it without even changing clothes, relishing the plush comfort of the duvet and too-soft mattress as they swallow me up. I haven’t had a migraine like this in a while – not with the blurred vision and ocular aura. I remember my first ocular migraine, and how scary it was. I didn’t know what was going on or why I was seeing prisms of light in my slowly blurring vision, and neither did my mom. We ended up sitting in the local ER for several long hours as the pain in my head grew worse, only to be toldit’s just a migraine, here’s a pain reliever.
After that, mom and dad helped me learn to navigate what ended up being chronic migraines. I learned the early signs and how they present most often for me, and I learned that migraines aren’t one size fits all. Even for one person each migraine can be different from the last. Sometimes I have pain that knocks me off my feet, but no sensitivity to light or sound or smells. Sometimes I have blurred vision in one eye and nausea. Sometimes pain isn’t a migraine at all, but gluten that got into my system somehow.
I’ve been navigating the realities of a complicated health history for years, but I’ve always tried to push through the pain. Work through the headaches and nausea and vision problems. Until I met Roger Galligher.
When I played for Roger, he would insist that his players take care of their physical and mental health. He recognized that we were college students, that we had needs outside of the softball field and training facility. We had anxieties and health concerns and classes on top of it all. He’s the reason I went to a counselor for the first time, and the reason I still see one now. He’s the reason I learned to take days off when mybody wasn’t up to the strain of a game or a training session or a practice. The reason that I’m okay with taking days off now. Roger was a father figure when I needed him, and remains one to this day, and frankly I’d rather take a day off than be on the receiving end of his “disappointed dad” face. And now that I’m finally in this bed, I’m glad I listened to him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Care
MAX
There’sa noticeable absence in the dugout, and I’m not the only one aware that Sutton isn’t here. Jose Alvarez is a great hitting coach, but he’s not Sutton. Sutton doesn’t just know hitting, she knows her hitters. She knows how to get Luca out of his own head. How to get Perez to shake off his nerves. Perez is taking the news of Sutton’s absence tonight worse than anyone. It would be funny if I wasn’t so worried about him.
Perez paces the dugout, anxiety radiating off of him. “I don’t know what to do, man. She always has the best pep talks. She knows what all the reports mean. She knows my swing!”
“So go out there and make her proud.” It’s all I can muster, but somehow, it works. Perez digs in, watches a first pitch sail way off the edge of the plate, and then swings for the fences.
My pitching is a different story altogether. Roger didn’t want me distracted, and that’s not the problem. The problem is the tightness in my elbow. The first inning is quick. Three up, three down. When I take the mound in the third inning, the tightness is a little more of a nagging pain. I shake my arm out a few times, loosening things up as much as I can. Nico signals for a pitch and I shake him off. Once. Twice. A third time andhe finally calls a time out, jogging out to meet me on the mound.
“I’m not calling for a trainer unless you tell me to, but Max, I think we need to get someone out here.”
When I stand on the pitcher’s mound I have to trust my catcher, whoever it is behind home plate, I have to be able to trust them. And I trust Nico Martinez with my life. And my arm. There’s twelve weeks left in the season. A trip to the injured list now would, most likely, spell the end of my season. But I nod, and Nico signals to the dugout.
Allison Stanton, the Olympians head athletic trainer, jogs out to the mound and asks the standard questions about my pain level, and how my arm is feeling and if I were ten years younger, I’d try to stay out here for the rest of the inning, but if I have any hope of ending this season on the active roster I need to do what’s best for me – and what is ultimately best for my team – so I take myself out of the game.
“I don’t think you’re going to need a CT scan,” Allison says as we head through the tunnel toward the training room, “at least not tonight, but when we get home it might be a good idea to get checked out.”
“Thanks Doc.”
As much as I want to head back to the hotel and check on Sutton, I know how it looks to have your starting pitcher pulled by a trainer and not show back up in the dugout, so the training staff ices and wraps my elbow and shoulder, and I find my way back out to the bench to cheer on my team. I sit down near Jose, who appears overwhelmed by the scouting reports and things on his tablet. As players come to him with questions, he answers but a few of them glance over at me as if to askwhat would Sutton say?
Sutton would tell them that good hitters wait. I’ve heard her say it hundreds, if not thousands, of times. She would alsotell them that hall of fame hitters fail seventy percent of the time. She would tell them that hitting a baseball is one of the hardest things in the world…and when she’s done sounding like a motivational poster in a high school locker room, she’d tell them to take a few deep breaths and block out the noise.
So that’s what I tell Jose.
This isn’t his first time at the helm for Sutton, but during her suspension he had time to plan for stepping into her shoes. Tonight he was thrown into them.
“Take a few deep breaths, Alvarez,” I clap him on the shoulder as he frantically flips through charts on his tablet. “You’ve got this. Sutton trusts you, and so does the team.”
“Thanks Max.”
The game ends with a blowout win on our part, and in my post-game interviews I answer countless questions about my elbow, my contract, and potential retirement. What I’d like to tell them all is that my partner is back at the hotel with a migraine so bad she had to miss a game, when I know for a fact she’s coached through them before. I’m glad she opted for rest, but I hate that she’s alone and I’d rather be with her instead of answering their questions. But, I give them my usual lines:
I haven’t made any decisions about retirement yet.
