Simon looked over the list. "It says nothing about swallowing your tongue, just no objects in their mouth. It does say to call 911 if the seizure lasts longer than five minutes or they don't return to their normal state."
The questions kept coming until Claire couldn't contain herself and spoke up. "Look, people don't swallow their tongues. And if you put your fingers in their mouth, they might bite them off, okay? Or if you use a spoon, they might chip their teeth on it when they spasm."
The room got quiet, and she continued, "The biggest thing is, don't let me hit my head. The most common injuries with seizures occur when the person falls, specifically head injuries. And seizures are usually over quickly—like under a minute—so an ambulance is rarely needed. Do you know how expensive an ambulance ride is?"
Her breath hitched, and she bit her lip to cut off her rant. Well, hairy horse feathers. Way to stay out of the spotlight, Claire. She lowered her head and examined her hands clenched tightly in her lap.
"You said 'me,'" Jenny said.
"What?" Claire looked up.
"When you described someone having a seizure, you said 'don't let me hit my head.' You know about this personally, Claire?"
Claire crumpled in her chair. Ugh. She'd never intended to share her condition with anyone but her bosses. She swallowed under the scrutiny of her colleagues. Oh well. It was probably best they knew, since the team spent so much time together. And the Norway trip was coming up.
She straightened her spine and cleared her throat. "Um, yes. I have a seizure disorder so it's probably good for y'all to know about it. But it's well controlled through medication, and I haven't had one in a while. As long as I'm taking my medication and dealing properly with my stress, it shouldn't be a problem." Claire crossed her fingers under the table, hoping she wasn't telling a big fat lie.
When no one said anything further, Simon cleared his throat and spoke again. "Okay. Thanks for sharing, Claire. I'll forward this brochure on seizure first aid, so everyone has a copy. Unless anyone has further questions, we're done with our safety moment. What's the status on the development sandbox? Rick?"
The meeting continued as normal, with everyone giving their weekly updates. Claire was happy to sit in the background and let everyone talk around her. She'd had enough exposure today, thank you very much.
When the developers began briefing the team, Claire shook herself and sat up straight as her turn approached. When Simon called on her, she was ready.
"To update extended team members on the call, we got approval to use the report codes for the sites." A round of cheers went up, and Claire waited for everyone to settle before continuing. "I've set up a template for us to populate as we create them. Once we're done, we can simply upload the file."
Simon looked up from his computer. "I don't see the template in the repository. What folder did you save it in?"
Claire frowned. "I saved it in the site codes folder. Let me look." She opened the app, giving the universe a silent thank you when her password worked properly. She browsed through the directory.
The file was gone. Her pulse spiked. No, no, no. She skimmed through the other directories, hoping she'd mistakenly saved it elsewhere. Her heart thudded in her chest as her mind flashed back to NanoTechwise—files disappearing, code overwritten, her credibility chipped away one "mistake" at a time.
"I'm not sure what's going on," she said, trying to keep her voice steady. "I've been working on it in the shared directory. It was there this morning."
Simon glanced at Vicki. "Are you aware of any other issues with the repository? Have we lost any other files?"
Vicki shrugged. "Not as far as I know."
Biting her lip, Claire looked at Simon. Between the technical issues and her epilepsy being exposed, she felt like she was losing ground with the team. But she could get it back. Thank goodness she'd learned her lesson with The Jerkwad at NanoTechwise.
She straightened her shoulders. "The good news is I have a backup. I made a local copy of the final spreadsheet. I'll upload it right now, so Noah can review it once we're done here." She caught Noah's eye. "It contains the key fields, but there may others you'd like to add. It would be best if we finalize the format before we start filling it in."
Noah nodded at her and made a note on his notepad.
"That's my update." Claire exhaled slowly and rolled her shoulders, then stretched her neck from side to side, trying to shake off the tension.
When Simon moved on to the next team member, she quietly uploaded the master site template again. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard for a beat longer than necessary. Files didn't just vanish. She made a note to check if she could access the activity logs. Something wasn't right. All her work would have been down the drain if not for her habit of backing everything up.
As they wound down, Rick reminded everyone they were running a complete database refresh on the development server over the weekend using Claire's upload method. They'd been using it for minor data refreshes, and this would be the first time they'd used it to reset the development data to match production.
"And we're comfortable with the new process?" Simon asked.
Delbert surprised Claire by answering. "Yeah, Claire's process has worked great on quick refreshes and those are usually more complicated than an entire reset, so it shouldn't be an issue at all."
Claire beamed. She loved how they referred to it as her process and how quick everyone was to brag about it.
"Good. The leadership team was happy we came up with a secure solution for extracting our data after the situation with Wesley exposed our security weakness." Simon gathered his papers and prepared to close the meeting.
When Claire realized he wasn't going to expand, she asked, "Who's Wesley? And what security weakness did he expose?"
