Sudden Onset

One day you're sprinting round the Central Park Reservoir, the next you're lying unconscious on a floor in pitch darkness because your heart stopped beating: How ME begins.

Copyright 2026 Hillary Johnson. All Rights Reserved.

It was February 7, 1986, and I was thirty-five.

I did my standard three mile run earlier that day, a habit of years’ duration. My profession was magazine journalist, and I spent several hours in the afternoon finishing an assignment for Gentlemen’s Quarterly or GQ. The story, my suggestion to the editors, was about a screenwriting class in Los Angeles that was so popular even established screen writers considered it to be the sine qua non of screenplay literacy in a city where everyone, from bus drivers to plumbers to CEOs, wrote screenplays. The guru-like instructor used the movies Casablanca and Chinatown to illustrate the elements that separated the mediocre screenplay from the brilliant. The subject was hardly weighty. The piece just had to be amusing. More on that assignment, later.

That night, I had dinner with a reporter friend at the California Pizza Kitchen in Brentwood. I was living temporarily in Los Angeles to complete the GQ story and other assignments. I had rented a studio in a high rise building on Wilshire Boulevard for the duration. My home was New York, where I had lived for sixteen years since attending graduate school there.

To my dismay, I couldn’t sleep that night. I made my way through a thicket of worries about my future instead, including the fact that I needed sleep for the day to come. The plan was to drive to Santa Barbara with a boyfriend—what a quaint word that seems as I write it—where we were to have lunch with his father.

I had constructed an overly elaborate life, or so it suddenly seemed. I was traveling back and forth between the east and west coasts, writing nearly every day. I answered not to one editor or one corporate journalism establishment as I had done in my first decade as a writer, but to several. My work provided me with the freedom to pick and choose my assignments and my income was substantial. Increasingly, I longed to stay in one place and focus my energy. I had a book in mind. I had begun preliminary research, and on my last day in New York my literary agent treated me and the book editor who wanted to publish it to lunch at La Grenouille to celebrate.

On that sleepless night, in fact, I felt overwhelmed by what surely was an embarrassment of riches. Was I making smart decisions or was I squandering my good fortune? Only three weeks before, an editor at the Los Angeles Times had called me to ask if I would like to be a columnist. “What would I write about?” I asked. “The Hollywood A list, philanthropists—people who support the Getty (museum) and the arts.” I was silent. “Really—anything you want,” she said when I seemed to hesitate. With a rigidity of thought that amazes me even now, I explained that I was about to write a book. It never occurred to me in the moment that I could do both.

A week later, she called again. “Is it about the money?” After thanking her for her interest, I told her it was not about the money, it was about my unwritten book. And I turned her down again.

A vast, ancient literature exists about demonic genies who grant wishes that result in disastrous, unexpected consequences. I was about to get my wish.

***

When the light began to enter the room, the concerns of the night vanished and I got out of bed. Standing upright after hours on the horizontal had a radical effect on me, though I barely had time to think about it before I tipped into the nearest wall and slid to the floor. It was hard to get back to the vertical after that. I lost my balance and fell a second time. On my third attempt, I developed an uneasy stasis with the floor as long as I walked slowly, intentionally.

I showered and dressed but felt shaky and intellectually cloudy. I was not seeing objects in my periphery. I discovered my temperature was 101. My most striking symptom was throat pain. The symptom was outsized, as if my throat had been slashed by a machete, bisecting the trachea. Years later, a doctor would characterize it as a “machete throat” in a lengthy narrative he prepared for a disability insurance company. With trembling fingers, I managed to open an aspirin bottle. I swallowed three pills, the first of many that day.

Eventually, with his help—let’s call the boyfriend George—I sunk into his low-slung two-seater car, and we sped down an inland road from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. He covered me up to my chin with his bomber jacket. He smiled at me, an encouraging grin, suggesting he was confident that whatever ailed me would soon pass. I tried to smile at him but increasingly felt barely able to communicate by word or expression. I was beginning to suspect, without any particular authority, that something monumental had happened in the night. My brain was not working as it should. Every normal sensation was off kilter. My vision seemed untrustworthy, as if I was living in the world reflected in a fun house mirror. Would there be any coming back from this?

My head fell back on the seat, and I shut my eyes tightly to block the sunlight. I inhaled the citrus scent as we sped through the inland route to Santa Barbara, orange groves on either side of the roadway.

The restaurant seating plan turned out to be a collection of linen-topped tables arranged in short, neat rows on a concrete pad next to the ocean. The father was gregarious and welcoming. He had brought his wife, an elegant woman with a pleasant smile. I wanted to speak, to make a connection, but it seemed there were three inches of plexiglass between us. Why was everyone talking so fast?

Someone at another table was wearing a cowboy hat. When the waitress asked me for my order, I told her I wanted a saddle. She paused, her pen hovering above the notepad, and asked, “Salad?” I nodded.

My confidence was shattering. Wanting little more than to escape the confusing scene, I excused myself. I stepped off the concrete onto the sand and walked toward a free-standing structure closer to the ocean that housed the restrooms. Difficulties continued to accrue. With feet that were suddenly heavy as cinder blocks, I staggered toward the small building. At last, I entered a windowless, dimly lit room, gripped the edge of the sink with both hands, and stared in the mirror. I was searching for some disfigurement that might justify my symptoms, but before I could focus, I fainted. Eventually, the automatic light in the small room timed out as I lay on the sandy concrete floor.

After some period of time, my dining partners sent a scout. I opened my eyes to see the boyfriend’s upside-down face hovering over me. “Jesus,” he muttered softly. He put his hands under my arms to drag me free of the heavy door and onto the beach. The structure hid us from the view of other patrons. Slowly, he pulled me up until I was standing, but my knees kept buckling.

If ever there was a moment to call EMS, that was the moment. In a far away future, people with such symptoms will be hospitalized; there will be a blood test. They will be hooked up to intravenous lines dispensing antivirals, fluids, anti-inflammatories, blood—anything to interrupt the torrent of damage. In my case, the boyfriend was a 32-year-old eager to show off his intended to his freewheeling Dad. That he found her unconscious on the bathroom floor of the restaurant where he had earlier made his introductions could not have been more awkward.

We walked back to the table, his arm tightly around my waist. To the casual onlooker, we were a besotted couple. In truth, his rigid arm was all that was holding me upright. His father studied me with a benign but curious expression. Was I high?

On the drive home, George tried again to cheer me up. He had a Bing Crosby voice and a command of American musicals. To please me, he started with West Side Story. When I was nine, I learned the lyrics from the 1957 album of the Broadway production. I pirouetted around the living room and advanced up and down the stairs for effect, boasting: “When you’re a jet, you’re a jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dyin’ day!”

When I joined the sing-along, I was either flat, or in my effort to correct, I was sharp. Nor could I project my voice beyond a quavering whisper. The lyrics that I had known the way some people know the Lord’s prayer were inaccessible, too. Instead of “I feel charming,” I sang “I feel harming.” The boyfriend laughed, but I hadn’t meant to be funny. Until that day, I had a folksinger’s voice: clear, strong, on key. Overnight, some cerebral pathway was permanently severed. I believe it was my sentinel symptom, the prelude to a multi-faceted, incurable nervous system disorder.

That evening, I sat on the sofa, still feverish, stunned. At a loss, the boyfriend made me a hot toddy—bourbon, sugar and lemon—and put it into my hands. I took a tentative sip. My last thought of the day: Too sweet. Then I fainted again.

First of Three Parts. “Year One” and “Reentry” coming soon.

To my subscribers, if any among you had sudden onset, please leave a few lines in the comments about it. I think the night and day aspect of sudden onset ME is not as much appreciated as it should be.