January 23, 2007, was a Tuesday. President George W. Bush was slated to give his State of the Union speech that night. Earlier in the month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave the world the iPhone. Robert Pickton, thought to be Canada’s worst serial killer on record, sat in court as his jury trial got under way. It was cool in Florida that January, much cooler than normal. Light-jacket weather, as they say.
Jennifer was sitting in science class, her mind wandering off to whatever she was planning for that day after school. It was early morning. Sitting at her desk, Jennifer felt a tremendous pain in her chest come on unexpectedly and suddenly: a tightening, throbbing, penetrating niggle of some sort. She had no idea what was happening. It was as if some boy had walked over and thrust his fist directly between her breasts. The excruciating pain grew and lingered with each moment.
Damn, what’s happening? Jennifer asked herself.
Then it started.
Hic.
A pause.
Hic. Hic.
Water, Jennifer thought. I need some water and these hiccups will be gone, same as the last time.
She’d had the hiccups before. Not quite in the same manner as most kids (a bit more powerful and extended), but they always went away. And they had never been accompanied by so much pain. Where had that staggering pain in her chest come from—the damn hiccups were causing it?
No way, she thought.
Jennifer asked to be excused from the classroom.
“Sure, go ahead,” her teacher said.
Her classmates looked on as Jennifer, seemingly panicked, hiccupping repeatedly, fast and furious, walked out of the room.
All the way down the hallway: Hic. Hic. Hic. The hiccups came in quick repetition, in groups of three or four or even five.
Hic. Hic. Hic.
Pause.
Hic. Hic. Hic. Hic.
She took a drink of water from the student fountain. Held her breath. It had worked once before.
Not this time.
Thirty minutes passed. Jennifer was back in class; that pain still there, and the hiccups continuing. Fellow students were looking at her strangely, wondering what in the world was going on. Was she drumming up the hiccups for attention? Did she want to get out of class?
Hic. Hic. Hic.
Students to her left and right were already becoming impatient. It was disruptive and irritating.
What the hell, Mee?
That chest pain grew more intense.
Jennifer raised her hand: “Can I go down to the nurse’s office?”
“Certainly,” said the teacher.
An hour passed and Jennifer was still hiccupping. The pain, still generalized in the center of her chest, was now unbearable, as if someone had been punching her, over and over, not letting up. A brain freeze from eating ice cream too fast times ten.
The nurse had Jennifer hold her breath.
Didn’t work.
Breathe into a paper bag.
Nope.
Drink a glass of water while holding her nose.
That was a damn old wives’ tale.
Of course, it didn’t work.
“Try this peanut butter,” the nurse told her.
Tasted great, but had no effect whatsoever. If anything, Jennifer was hiccupping more now, faster, so it felt harder. The pain was deeper and so overwhelming she couldn’t lie down. Her diaphragm hurt. Her stomach ached.
Jennifer called her mother.
“You’re kidding? I don’t believe you,” Rachel told her daughter. “You must want to leave school early.” According to Jennifer, Rachel even laughed. She had never heard of such a thing: the hiccups coming on and not going away.
“No, I’m not—hic, hic, hic—kidding, Mom. I’m serious. . . .”
Hic, hic, hic.
The nurse got on the phone with Rachel. “It’s true.”
“Okay, if they persist for another thirty minutes, call me and I’ll come and get her,” Rachel said.
Jennifer had started to cry moments after arriving at the nurse’s office because she had no idea what was going on. This bout with the hiccups, she could tell right away, was different from anything she’d ever experienced. It was painful, and it scared Jennifer.
Thirty additional minutes passed. Now, ninety minutes or more into it, Jennifer called her mother and told her to hurry up. She needed to get out of this school.
Now.
“I want to go home,” Jennifer said through tears.
“I’m on my way, honey.”
Rachel knew it was no ruse to get out of school; her Jennifer was in pain.
After arriving home and trying various tried-and-true remedies, none of which worked, Jennifer tried to go to sleep, thinking that a good night’s rest might shake the hiccups. If not, at least she could take a break from what was now a condition beyond irritating and alarming and painful.
CHAPTER 28
HE WAS INSIDE the barn preparing a 350-pound hog for slaughter. While picking up the beast and trying to hang the thing so he could butcher it humanely with a rather large, serrated knife, which lay on the table by his side, he bent down and something popped inside his head.
Charles Osborne, a father of eight, slipped, fell, and was knocked out cold.
“I felt nothing,” Osborne later said.
As he came to, Osborne noticed something different right away.
Hic. Hic. Hic.
He had the hiccups. One nearly every second and a half.
Hic, hic, hic, hic . . .
It was involuntary. He couldn’t control it. As if lifting that pig and falling down had broken something inside him. Had he blown a brain gasket or something?
Weird.
In fact, it wasn’t so strange. Without knowing it, Charles Osborne had ruptured a small part of his brain that controlled the hiccup response in his body. His body had no choice but to hiccup.
If, when she awoke on the morning of January 24, 2007, Jennifer Mee thought eighteen hours with the hiccups had been a long spell, Charles Osborne had her beat by sixty-seven years, 364 days and six hours. Osborne had developed the hiccups on that 1922 morning when he lifted an oversized hog and a blood vessel popped in his head. They lasted until 1990, the year before he died at ninety-seven years old, when the hiccups mysteriously stopped on their own without warning or reason. It has been said that Mr. Osborne, a farmer and former military man, had started out hiccupping at least forty times per minute, but cut it down to twenty during those latter years just before the irritating condition stopped. In order to eat, he had developed a way of breathing taught to him by Mayo Clinic doctors, who had tried for years to cure him.
Still, any bout with the hiccups longer than the norm of ten or so minutes was torture—anyone could agree with that. For Jennifer Mee, as she opened her eyes after a night of not sleeping much, lots of tossing and turning and chest pains, not to mention thoughts of what was happening to her, they were still there.
Hic. Hic. Hic.
Jennifer Mee rolled over and started to cry.
What was she going to do?
Mom got on the telephone to Jennifer’s doctor first thing that morning after realizing that this was more than a routine bout with the hiccups that all children (and even adults) experienced from time to time. Something was terribly wrong with Jennifer.
“Make it stop, Mom. Please.”
The hiccups involve a “sudden, involuntary contraction (spasm) of the diaphragm muscle” near the base of the lungs. Hiccupping is considered a digestive disorder. When that contraction takes place, in the same instant, the vocal cords close and what we refer to as the hiccup sound is produced. Most, if not all, medical texts report the causes as eating too quickly, drinking or eating too much at once, surgery in the adnominal region, strokes, brain tumors, even noxious fumes, and some medications, which can bring on a bout with the hiccups. As most people have experienced, hiccups that come on unexpectedly generally go away after a glass of water or swallowing air or after a few hours/minutes on
their own. The rule of thumb in the medical community is that hiccups lasting more than twenty-four hours should not be a cause to become frenzied and think the world is coming to an end. Rather, they’re perhaps a minor concern and a call to your doctor to see what to do next is warranted. After all, the doctor might think there is an underlying problem. According to the most recent research: Some illnesses for which continuing hiccups may be a symptom include: pleurisy of the diaphragm, pneumonia, uremia, alcoholism, disorders of the stomach or esophagus, and bowel diseases. Hiccups may also be associated with pancreatitis, pregnancy, bladder irritation, liver cancer or hepatitis. Surgery, tumors, and lesions may also cause persistent hiccups.6
Jennifer was suffering from a serious condition—much more severe than perhaps she or Rachel knew then. Her hiccups were not the type that lasted a few minutes or, at the most, a few hours and then went away. Here it was twenty-four hours later and she was still hiccupping. Her stomach now hurt a lot because of the constant, uncontrollable contractions. She had a headache. The chest pain had subsided some, but was still present. Her throat was sore. She had back pain from the constant jerking. Her hips began to bother her.
All she could do was cry.
“Why?” she asked her mother.
They went into the doctor’s office after Rachel called and spoke to a nurse.
“Intractable hiccups,” the doctor told them during that first visit.
Generally, an intractable hiccups diagnosis is not made until one has the hiccups for two weeks or more. This was a good indication, though Rachel had no idea at the time that her doctor was not at all familiar with how to deal with Jennifer’s condition. Perhaps like most other physicians, Jennifer’s doctor figured the hiccups would go away on their own after some time.
Rachel and Jennifer looked at each other.
“Chronic” was what the doctor meant when he said “intractable.”
“What can we do?” Rachel wanted to know. Frustrated already.
The doctor explained that they needed to find out why Jennifer was hiccupping so often. What was the root cause? Was there some sort of underlying issue that started the hiccups and kept them going, like in the Charles Osborne case? Jennifer was not new to having the hiccups; she’d had them before for periods of an hour, two, maybe three. There was something going on here that Jennifer felt was different—that she was now involved with a condition that was going to take over her life more than it had already.
Treatment involved a wide variety of remedies (some old, some new, some urban legends, some not) and even medication.
What hurt Rachel most was seeing Jennifer cry and break down, experience that pain brought on by the side effects of having the hiccups for an extended period of time.
“We tried to keep her spirits up,” Rachel said later. “We wanted to keep her smiling. But when she starts hurting, it breaks my heart.”
For Rachel and Chris, it was the helplessness. The fact that there was nothing Rachel and Chris could do for their child.
They left the doctor’s office with a fraying sense of hope—and, of course, medication. It was the only remedy the doctor could think of.
The first round, Chlorpromazine, a med that is commonly given by doctors for intractable hiccups, came with a host of side effects. Among them were drowsiness and faintness, palpitations and tachycardia (a dangerously fast heart rate). Yet, Jennifer experienced none of those. Instead, after taking just one dose, she broke out in hives all over her body and had trouble breathing.
The doctor suggested Valium: ten milligrams, four times a day.
This calmed Jennifer down and allowed her to deal with the hiccups—or at least feel as if she could deal with the hiccups.
“But she walked around the house like a zombie,” Rachel recalled.
It was a Band-Aid. It masked the symptoms and made her feel doped up. It did nothing to correct the problem.
Two days turned into a week
Hic, hic, hic . . .
Jennifer went to several pediatricians and a neurologist. She had an MRI, CAT scan, X-rays, bloodwork. She saw a cardiologist.
“Nothing,” Jennifer said. “They could not tell us anything.”
One week turned into two and then three.
“We tried peanut butter again, tablespoons of sugar, mustard, gallons and gallons of water. . . .”
She even drank vinegar.
None of it worked.
Quite interesting, when Jennifer was interviewed by a local news crew during those weeks after the hiccups began, she said, “Someone told me to take a hit of marijuana—yeah, right!”
Then the reporter asked, “You’re definitely not going to go that route, right?”
Jennifer responded, laughing, “Definitely not.”
But the sad fact was that she had been smoking weed and taking other drugs leading up to this time. And none of that had worked, either.
Rachel had no idea what to do. Doctors in Florida were saying they couldn’t do anything more than they were: doping her up on meds she had allergic reactions to.
Jennifer cried and complained about the pain. The irritation and the sheer frustration of this dreaded condition that had taken over every second of her life was almost too much to bear. Her depression deepened. She felt as if nothing was going to work.
“I’ll never get married . . . ,” she told Rachel. “Never get to have kids.”
More than that, wherever she went after word spread around town of her condition, Jennifer was being recognized and, at times, ridiculed.
Kids would mimic her and yell things at Jennifer.
“Stop faking!”
“Are you drunk, bitch?”
“You pregnant?”
Jennifer’s self-esteem, which before this was considered seriously low, anyway, sank to even lower levels and compounded what was a growing self-consciousness and self-hatred. She began to feel that everyone was looking at her and talking about her wherever she went. One of Jennifer’s favorite things to do on Friday nights was go to the movies with friends. She couldn’t do that anymore because kids from school would chastise her, get in her face, call her vicious names, and bully her. Just the hiccups alone would irritate other people watching the movie.
And then the accusations began: a majority of the people in town believed she was making it all up for the attention.
Rachel sat by and watched her daughter suffer. It was horrendous.
At one point, Jennifer said something that Rachel could not ignore. Rachel now had to do something drastic. She would have to act.
“She was getting picked on in school and public,” Rachel recalled. “She was not sleeping much. Always in pain and she didn’t see an end to it.”
Jennifer came to Rachel one night.
“No one is going to want to date me. . . .”
“We’ll figure it out, honey. Don’t worry.”
Jennifer had heard this now for weeks.
“We will figure out how to stop it, I promise,” Rachel said.
“I want to jump off the Sunshine Skyway,” Jennifer said.
“What?”
Jennifer indicated that suicide was now an option.
Hearing this crushed Rachel.
“It might have been idle talk,” Rachel said later, “but I knew then I had to do whatever I could to try to stop the hiccups.”
Sitting at home, wondering what to do next, where to go, how to deal with this problem that had taken over their lives, realizing her options had all run out, Rachel decided to take control of the situation and do something she would later be ridiculed for, but she felt she had no other alternative but to at least try. It was, Rachel felt, their only option for getting rid of the hiccups for good.
CHAPTER 29
RACHEL THOUGHT ABOUT what she could do to help her ailing daughter. Sitting idly on the sidelines, watching Jennifer agonize and manage tremendous pain, was slowly destroying the mother of five. The hiccups were their life now. There was no other focus in t
he Robidoux household. All of the doctors they had gone to could do nothing more than shrug their shoulders and whip out a prescription pad. Rachel needed to speak with a bona fide expert—someone with experience in battling long-term, acute hiccups. Pickle juice and drinking water upside down was stupid. All those so-called remedies did nothing more than cause Jennifer to become more frustrated. She was hiccupping now about fifty times per minute, almost once per second.
“Stressful,” Jennifer recalled. “I couldn’t go anywhere. I just stayed inside my home.”
She felt like a sideshow . . . a prisoner.
When Jennifer did dredge up the courage to go out, some offered prayers, while others tried to sneak up behind Jennifer and scare the hiccups out of her. The prayers and good wishes were thoughtful, sure, but the negative and mean people of the world overshadowed any good that anybody was trying to send Jennifer’s way.
One astute doctor they visited during this period suggested Jennifer’s hiccups were signs of a “tic disorder” often associated with Tourette’s. But Rachel wrote it off, saying Jennifer never showed any signs of twitching or having erratic, inappropriate, often vulgar, and obscene outbursts, all of which are symptoms of Tourette’s.
By now, Jennifer’s hips were hurting so badly from the constant jerking of her body every time she hiccupped, it was hard to walk. Her diet consisted of applesauce, Jell-O, and ice cream, all foods she could swallow in an instant, between each hiccup. She was actually scared of eating anything solid, for she feared she might choke to death.
As Rachel and Jennifer started to research the lasting effects of long-term hiccups, they did not like what they found. Decreased physical strength, depression, and possibly even death, reported an article from the University of Colorado, Denver. Death had occurred in patients suffering the hiccups and a secondary, underlying condition. Were the hiccups a sign of some other ailment Jennifer had that could potentially kill her?
Just one more thing to worry about.
The concern everyone had more than most anything else was the fact that Jennifer had been prone to depression already. Would her condition now send her into an abyss of sadness she couldn’t come back from? Was that momentary mention of suicide by Jennifer an actual cry for help? Was Jennifer thinking that suicide was the only way to put an end to the pain and ridicule?
One Breath Away: The Hiccup Girl - From Media Darling to Convicted Killer Page 10