Batteries Included

By Mary Margret Daughtridge

On Wednesday August 3, I was so deep in denial that even though I was about to drown, I hadn’t noticed the water was up to my chin. And rising.

I waked up feeling unusually bad—even worse than the terrible, which had become my new normal in the last three months. When I checked my blood pressure and pulse, the BP was 88/54 and my pulse was 41.

Despite visits to cardiologists, tests, etc., it still never occurred to me that something was wrong—I mean seriously wrong—with my heart.

Fortunately, I already had a doctor’s appointment that day and as the CMA took my blood pressure I thought I should ask her what the red zone for BP and pulse was. Like how low did it have to be before I called 911? With Spock -like detachment, as if she’d never pondered the question before, she turned round Hershey’s Kiss brown eyes on me and after a second said, “I don’t know. Let me ask the doctor.”

Ten minutes later I was wheeled into the ER where, unprecedented in my experience, the clerk waved me on and said he’d fill out the forms and take my insurance card later. I had never before been ushered into the presence of the High Priests of Medicine without proof of ID and insurance coverage.

As the minion rolled me past cubbies and glass-enclosed rooms and curtained-areas, I saw all the patients, and in a world-changing identity switch, for the first time I was not a guest, not a visitor – I was not, as always before, there to help or support them. I was them.

Secure in my denial, I was a little ticked off when all the doctors, nurses, PAs, orderlies, and even the housekeeping staff assumed I was being admitted for a pacemaker.

Fast forward: today is Friday and I have a pacemaker. In case you didn’t know, pacemakers are about the size of a fifty cent piece and the price of a new car.

Romance writers are concerned with affairs of the heart. We describe and ascribe feelings, states of being, and even truth as arising from or about the heart. Think of all the ways we use it: heartfelt, softhearted... Linguistically, courage and heart derive from the same root word. A lover is a heartthrob.

I find myself wondering, where does a heart that needs to be wired to a battery fit in? I pondered this little philosophical conundrum with a friend, also a romance writer, who suggested I make friends with my pacemaker and name it. I decided in the best romantic tradition to call it my beloved. Like the romance writer I am, I named it mon coeur.

And one day after surgery to insert the tiny device, I feel better than I have in a couple of years. My friends and loved ones look at me and exclaim, “At last, you’re back!”

And I am. This time, batteries included.

Blackhawks, Black Ops. Men in Black

by Mary Margret Daughtridge

The other day, out making an errand run, on the spur of the moment I decided to detour to a friend’s house.

I paid little attention when the shiny lime green car behind me made the same turns I did, until it turned into the driveway of my friend’s next door neighbor, just as I pulled into her drive. A man got out and walked toward me flashing a badge.

That’s the beginning of the story I was going to introduce this blog with. Sorry, I can’t tell you more. I realized if I told the story even if I disguised as many details as I could, anyone who knew just a few public facts about me would be able to interpolate the rest. And you never know, you just never know who will read a blog.

So I dumped the whole idea.

But thinking about how easily any disguise of a true story could unravel made me appreciate the extreme secrecy under which SEALs operate. Fundamentally, everything about everything they do is secret.

Which is why I was surprised to hear on national media that SEALs specifically rather than “a Special Operations team” were responsible for ending bin Laden’s career.

I was surprised because the media proceeded to do exactly what they do—which is dig for more facts.

“When are we going to see pictures of these men?”

Never. You’d might as well sign their death certificates. The photos would go viral in under three minutes and terrorist organizations would be using them for target practice. If you knew the face of a man you were looking for, it wouldn’t be all that hard to learn where an off-duty SEAL might be.

“When will their names be released?”

Never. They have families, children. Just one name leaked could put the lives of entire families on the line.

SEALs succeed by appearing where nobody expects them to be and doing what no one knows they can do. I’ve become fairly skillful at reading between the lines of news reports. Imagine what someone with real intelligence at their disposal could do.

I know how much can be put together from seemingly unrelated facts. Tom Clancy author of Hunt for Red October came this close to being accused of breeching national security for his mix of great research and spot-on conjecture.

SEALed Forever, my May release, is the result of odds and ends I’ve picked up. An opinion expressed in a periodical, facts about the phenomenal increase of more of less off–the-books intelligence gathering, mentions of SEALs being employed in various capacities—it all adds up.

I extrapolated a little here, bent a little there. Every word is fiction. But then, being a writer chased by my own imagination, I wonder , “What if all that stuff I made up—what if it’s true?”

What if some morning the men in black are on my doorstep wanting to know how I learned about the baby who was smuggled into the country aboard a spy plane?