Category Archives: Uncategorized

the smell of collard greens and sickness: 38 today

24 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by in kids, marriage, my awesome husband, parenting, PTSD, Sin, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Today was the kind of day you question this whole having-5-kids thing. It’s my birthday and I’ve spent it tending 3 sick kids and taking another one to the psychiatrist. We’re talking wall to wall puke and diarrhea. Kids whining and crying. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. And always, always, the cry from all directions: Mom!

That said, 38 is a good birthday. The sun is shining. My husband surprised me with some beautiful flowers (even more a surprise because I ran into him at the store as he was buying them-he thought it ruined the whole thing but I found it more of a unique thrill). Granted, the 16 month old knocked the flowers and the 2 quarts of water they were in on the floor, but still. Clean up efforts of the spill were difficult secondary to every single rag in the house being in the wash, dirty or currently used as a puke reservoir. But still.

I spent my 28th birthday in the midst of my five month long trauma. So, Hell. I spent my 28th birthday in Hell. The great thing about trauma is that it makes puke and diarrhea look pretty damn good.

I took my sick babies for a walk in the double stroller today around our neighborhood on the river. I ate Thai food and vegan cheese cake with a very nice raspberry sauce, made by my hubs. I drank some wine and even convinced my teetolaller hubs to join me. My kids all made me cards (ten minutes before the party once forced to by the hubs) that were very sweet. My hubs spent the day, when not reducing raspberry sauce or walking our daughter to the dollar store for more pink balloons, working on the medical practice we are opening. The best present ever.

And  I got one other very important gift: time to write this.  Luxury living at its finest. I do not know how I could have made it to 38 without writing. It was my escape as an outcast Aspergery tween, was my voice against oppression in high school and beyond, won me scholarships and fellowships that made me feel like maybe I really did belong in academia, inspired lyrics that gave me the drive and the confidence to sing in a punk band in front of hundreds of people despite being completely terrified, got me published in a legit medical journal at a time when I struggled with feeling like I was a *real* doctor. Most importantly, writing got me through the weeks and months directly after Jeremy was arrested. Through the second trauma of my medical school shaming me and trying to ruin my career. And it preserved my memories. A true privilege few trauma survivors have.

This blog helped me recover from my PTSD. It helps me still. The core of PTSD is shame. The only way to battle shame is to speak your truth. More specifically, to have someone hear your truth. And not walk away. It is a small little blog with a small group of followers, and I am grateful for each and every one of you. You are a precious gift to me on this my 38th birthday.

It surprises me how I begin to write these entries with a problem and think to myself “Why are you dwelling on this problem with no solution? Cut the pity party.” And I start to write and by the time I am done, I have found an unexpected solution or a new way of looking at it, or have found a path to accepting it as it is. It makes me wonder if anyone can recover from PTSD without creating something. Trauma is the opposite of creation. It is destruction. It is the Fall in the Garden, the closing of the gate. What is it that Eve suffered for the Fall? Pain in childbirth. Pain in creation. But she did not lose the ability to create new life.

There is a certain pain to my writing now that wasn’t there when I was younger. Before my trauma. Before I had my first little boy and was told he was sick at 6 days old (and on the 7th day God rested. I cried the deepest cry I ever have while God rested. He and I are still hashing that one out). Before. But there is still this gift of the ability to create, as God does. And there is a healing in it. And a connection. Maybe not to God so much, but to other people, other survivors–not just of trauma, but all the sad things we live– to time, tradition, cyclical history. And a connection of ideas, of the points of my life, of the people who’ve passed in and out of it. Maybe, just maybe, if I keep writing, it will all make sense. The connections will be drawn, the pattern will show itself. There will be an answer.

I made a big batch of smoky vegan collard greens today for lunch. I made a lovely kale strawberry smoothie for breakfast. I took my medication. I exercised. The day was still utter chaos. I was still pretty damn grumpy for most of it. But I still ate my greens. I did not resolve my ongoing spiritual struggle over the nature of God (he can’t be all loving and  all powerful, so he mustn’t be all powerful so… where the hell does that leave us?)  But I still ate my greens. I was a highly imperfect mother and wife. But I still ate my greens. I was lonely for a lot of reasons. But I still ate my greens.

And so, the house came to smell of sickness and collard greens on this my 38th birthday. But it was 74 and breezy and so we opened the windows and doors and aired the place out. Took the baby out in the yard barefoot. Walked down to the public dock and watched the water. Hung pink streamers and balloons and had a little party. Watched a cheezy terrorist movie starring Morgan Freeman with my husband with the volume down and made up our own dialogue (lip reading did reveal Mr. Freeman called one of the characters “son” as I predicted he would). Spilled some wine on the couch and laughed about it.

We aired the place out because, as I realized shortly before my 29th birthday, I am not in prison. I am alive and I am free. This is not a cell without windows. The sun is not kept from us. And I am not alone. I am eating my greens and cleaning up the messes as they come. The stuff of life. 38 years alive. Booyah.

MDMA in the valley of the shadow of death

06 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Trauma is a spiritual event. Trauma, at its core, is the feeling you have been abandoned. By everyone you know and by God himself. Some religious thinkers say Hell is not a fiery inferno or a place of torture, but simply the absence of God. So, maybe trauma is as close to Hell as we’ll ever come on Earth.
.
The one truly effective treatment science has come up with for PTSD is a spiritual one. The psychedelic drug MDMA (the active component in the drug known as ecstasy) is administered before therapy sessions. The reason the medicine works is that it reinstates in the patient the sense of connectedness. To humanity, to the world, and, if they believe in such, to God himself.
.
Religion seeks to answer the question of why we suffer. Some say there is meaning in suffering, that God is allowing us to suffer in his divine wisdom we often can’t begin to understand. Maybe to refine us as he does gold, as the evangelicals like to say. Maybe because we’re sinners. Or our ancestors are sinners. Or because someone kind of dared him into it (i.e. book of Job).
.
My favorite thinkers in this area are recent Jewish scholars who must reconcile this questions in light of the Holocaust. I cannot help but feel the most depth and authenticity comes from those who have seen the suffering and evil the world is capable of, who have lived it. I’ve also always found in Jewish tradition the highest concentration of spiritually, intellectually alive, grounded and wise clergy. I’m Catholic but I studied in the Jewish community and hold certain views more consistent with theirs.
.
Rabbi Harold Kushner (who wrote Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?) posits that there is no meaning to suffering itself but we can choose to give it meaning afterwards. There is no great divine plan that includes babies dying and little girls raped and tsunamis ripping off arms. There is no meaning in any of that. And God is not the one who does it. He would stop it if he could. But, in Kushner’s view, he is not all powerful. An all loving and all powerful God could never allow such suffering.
.
When my first son was born and the doctors told us he was sick, I went through a long darkness. I could not understand how God would allow babies to suffer and die (my son didn’t die but infants with his conditions did die up until 50 years ago when doctors figured out the treatment to manage it). I turned to Judaism because I recalled when I’d studied the idea that the word Israel means to wrestle with God.
.
It’s based off the biblical story of Jacob who wrestles with God through the night and in the morning his name is changed to Israel. The idea is that we can question God and the things he does, but we can never turn our backs on him. We can be angry but we cannot deny him.
.
I wrestled with God over my baby being sick. Over not knowing what he would be able to do as he got older, what he’d be able to see. I wondered if I’d done something to cause it, spiritually. Was I being punished? But I couldn’t reconcile the idea of a God who would punish an innocent baby for its mother’s sins.
.
In time I found peace. I developed an idea similar to Kushner’s. God was all loving and he did what he could, but he was limited. He’d chosen to limit himself for reasons I couldn’t completely understand.
.
I decided to become a doctor. My son’s doctors were very frustrating and I thought there should be at least one doctor in the world who got it. I knew he would need me to make a decent living since he’d have special needs. And I wanted to make him proud, wanted to get my act together and be the kind of mom he deserved. It was time to grow up. More than anything, I wanted something good to come of his medical problems. I wanted something so sad to inspire something good.
.
His suffering (and, let’s be honest, mine) was meaningless in its existence but I brought what meaning to it I could.
 .
He was three when I started medical school, against all odds (no one thought I would get it. Everyone thought I was crazy to try). He was three and a half when I met Jeremy Noyes. He was four when my medical school tried to kick me out for reporting my rapist. He was four when I fought like hell and won the right to stay.
.
He was seven when I graduated medical school. He was eleven when I finished my training and became what he called “a real professional doctor.”
.
I sometimes wonder if I would have fought to stay in medical school as hard as I did if it hadn’t been for him and his suffering. If I would have stayed in school and fought as hard as I did to get a residency and finish it. There was a primal drive there to protect my boys, to finish for them so I could provide.
 .
But there was something more too.
.
Something spiritual.
.
Becoming a doctor was the good that was to come from his suffering. If they’d managed to force me out of my medical career, not only would it have allowed Jeremy to have kept me from my calling and my livelihood, it would have done much more than that. It would have taken from me the peace I’d made with God over his being sick. It would have taken the meaning that allowed me to go on, walking in the world with that particular hole in my heart.
.
And so, I wonder, did one trauma help to save me from another?
.
I cannot help but think that those of us that have been to Hell on earth must know a thing or two the rest of you don’t. We buy up those corny books about people who say they’ve been to heaven in a near-death experience. Learn from them about love and peace. But, what of those of us who’ve been to hell? (What is trauma if not a near-death experience?) We bring with us a lesson not of mickey mouse cotton candy unicorn sappy love. We don’t return with messages that everything will be all right. We bring something deeper. A message that everything most definitely will not be all right, but if we are there for one another and step out bravely into what love really is, we will go on. And find meaning in anything that comes our way.

some of us are better prepared than others

22 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

After writing a post titled Joy is a Choice, I am now here to write about the fact I am depressed today. Not I’m-falling-into-the-abyss depressed, just glum I guess you could say. I was doing super well the past few days so I guess a bit of a crash was inevitable. Right? Maybe not but I’m going with it.

Christmas is a time to rejoice and I’ve been getting on my husband’s nerves telling him it over and over. He’s been a little glum himself and that’s probably not the best thing to say to some who’s bummed out. It’s probably a little really annoying as all hell. But it’s hard not to say it to someone being grinchy.

I am here writing this because I want to be honest and not just put my best foot forward, to try to make it seem I’ve triumphed over my struggles and am just 100% serene and dandy (no one is. no matter what their Facebook feed says). I am here writing this because life is a process and even though I am depressed, I know I am moving forward.

I know because I was able to say to myself, “this won’t last forever. you won’t always feel this way.” I tend to get so into how I’m feeling in the moment, I am convinced I will always feel that way. I also challenged some black and white thinking I tend to fall into. And even though I absolutely believed the string of horrible thoughts repeating over and over in my brain (in this instance, the recurring theme that I am a terrible mother who has ruined her children. what an awful thing to say to someone, even if it’s myself), I did remind myself that I know intellectually I am not seeing clearly. I am depressed and we have distorted thinking when we are depressed. And then I tried to come up with a counter-argument.

I kept seeing patients and doing some things for home in between. And I think the most important thing is, I went and chatted with my coworkers. Not about how I was feeling, but about the fact it is December 22nd and my husband and I are desperately scrambling to get a Christmas tree (he has since texted me he found one. thumbs up to my awesome hubs who did this with a baby and preschooler in tow no less). We talked about the coincidence the xray tech and I are both from families that grow Christmas trees, about how the nurse feels about his wife being pregnant and they educated me on fiberoptic Christmas trees (bizarre in my opinion and too much like those weird pink Christmas trees in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”).

I started to feel better and decided to make myself eat breakfast. I didn’t feel like it but I reminded myself not eating was not good for the depression. Reminded myself I am a fighter and will not just go into this willingly. Reminded myself even if I’m a terrible mother, I am at least one who refuses to stop trying to be better.

I have to celebrate the small victories, the day to day. I used to wonder how therapy could possibly help a sadness as deep as mine, one which seemed to come purely from the chemicals in my head. One that surely could only be fixed with the right pill. There is no dramatic moment when therapy kicks in and you’re cured. There is a slow process, though, of doing the work. Of facing your demons, yes, but also of learning all these little skills you never learned growing up. Each time I use one, each time I don’t go gently into that abyss, I have to remind myself of how far I have come even if I am not cured. Even if I am a still a little more melancholy (alternating with a little more wound up) than most. And this too I learned in therapy.

This will probably be a somewhat glum Christmas for us since we don’t have family or friends but it will be joyful too. We will laugh, watch our 4 year old squeal with delight when she unwraps her Frozen bike, feel triumphant if we get our 15 year old to smile with the silly games I’ve planned for Christmas day, pop the bottle of champagne I’ve been saving at Christmas dinner because Christ is born and there’s nothing better to celebrate.

Life is hard. We all really do have our cross to bear. Some of us were better prepared for it than others. I am sad when I think I may not be preparing my kids for it. I don’t need them to have an easy life. They’ve already been through enough to have cancelled that possibility. But I want to prepare them to persevere and to find joy amidst it all. And so, I must persevere because it’s never too late.

A new year began in the Catholic church a few weeks ago with the beginning of Advent. Christ is about to be born as he is every year. The rhythm of the year continues. He will be born again in another year no matter how this one goes. It is never too late.

pretending to grill in the garden of eden

04 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in love, PTSD, Rape, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

I have lost some weight recently. A goodly amount, I think it’s fair to say. Only ten more pounds to go. I weighed 150 pounds nine years ago when my trauma began and by 2013 I was 224 pounds. I ate for a lot of reasons. I’ll tell you about it some time.

Today I am thinking about a picture of me grilling. Well, pretending to grill. It was 2007 and I had left my first husband and was just starting medical school. I was young. So damned young. 28 to be precise. I just knew my soul mate awaited me out there. And I would of course find him on the internet. A single mom going to med school doesn’t have time to go out, so she would of course take advantage of online dating. But, I needed a profile picture. This was before the advent of selfies and not too many of us had a gaggle of carefully angled, flattering pictures of ourselves lying around in our smart phones. I didn’t even have a smart phone. So I asked my mother to take a picture of me.

I wanted to look natural so I said, take a picture of me in the kitchen cooking spaghetti. (Because everyone has a picture of them in full make up smiling as they cook spaghetti. So natural. And maybe I could use it if I ever decided to sell my own brand of jarred spaghetti sauce. Kill two birds with one stone. Bam) Unfortunately, the lighting in the kitchen was bad so we went out on the back patio of my little ranch house in Erie. Unsure of how to keep up the natural theme, I went for the grill. Here, I said, take a picture of me pretending to grill.

And so here I am today, looking at a picture of me with my hair perfectly done, pink lip gloss shining, smiling with my mouth and my eyes (so it wouldn’t look fake. Even though it was). Holding a large grilling spatula in my hand, the cold grill lid opened. No sign of my special needs toddlers to be seen. None of the dark circles I’d soon earn staying up late studying. The flat stare of depression that had occupied my face most of my life, the fear of the abuse I’d lived under, the wide eyes of my mania, absent. I’m beaming with hope in that picture. An endless stream of possibility before me. Faith that I will have a wonderful life. (I did work in the Jimmy Stewart Museum in high school, after all).

I do have a good life now. Nine years later. I have been blessed and I have fought for it. I certainly do not have the life I imagined then, when I was young. How many of us do? I have walked through my darkness these years and come out on the other side.

I am now almost to the weight I am in that picture. And as I have dropped each pound, run each mile, I have thought, this is a victory over my trauma. I have reclaimed my mental health and now I am reclaiming my physical. He can’t take this from me. I am leaving behind my trauma pound by pound. I am escaping a body that is not really mine. Getting back to being myself after so long.

But now I am close to the weight in the picture, to wearing the clothes I wore then, all of which I have saved in anticipation of this day. And I look in the mirror and I have not returned to looking like myself at all. I am not the girl at the grill.

My stomach has gone from that of a 28 year old whose had 2 kids to that of a 37 year old whose had 4 and gained and lost a lot of weight. My face has crow’s feet and laugh lines it didn’t then. And my eyes don’t smile the same. They’ve seen too much to smile so damned naïve. They smile not with happiness, but with the joy that comes from knowing sadness.

I’ll be honest with you, I wish my body looked like it did back then. I’d love to be a good feminist and not feel that way. I know I shouldn’t subconsciously convey such attitudes to my sweet daughter. But, life’s a process, okay? And I wish I was a little firmer, a little perkier. Less stretch marks. Less lines. But I don’t wish my eyes were perkier. I don’t wish these past nine years had been different. Don’t wish I could return to being naïve.

I’ve never believed in regret. It’s never made sense to my logical autistic brain. If you can’t do something over, why would you possibly sit around thinking about what might have been? It is what it is, I often say. Life is what it is.

I have no regrets about choosing the medical school I did. About pursuing the awful man I did. About turning him in as I did. Never have, never will. But I have been continuing to labor under the false idea we get after trauma. The idea that keeps us from moving on, that locks us into PTSD if we believe it enough. The idea that we can make this trauma not matter. That it can become a minor footnote in our life story. That we can go back to being who we were before. Before. Before *it*. You know, that event that doesn’t matter anymore. Even though it’s the yardstick we now measure every accomplishment by. Constantly claiming victory. Telling yourself, living well is the best revenge. Tallying up everything you have that your perpetrators never will. Telling yourself, I’m not like those whiny survivors who blame all their problems on their trauma. I’m different. I have overcome.

The truth is, your life was divided the day the trauma began. There was before the trauma and after. And it drives you mad. You just want that damned line erased. You want your life whole again. A beautiful continuous flowing story arc. With twists and turns and dips and peaks, but unbroken. But that fucking chasm, fault, break, schism, crack, gully, canyon, whatever you call it, it’s still there. Won’t budge. It’s not something you can remove. Because it’s not something. It’s the absence of something. You can try and try to fill it, but it’s still there. Go ahead, dump in food, pills, booze, drugs, sex, work, reckless driving, overspending, self injury, reality television, starvation, obsessive relationships, obsessive religion, hours of staring blankly at walls… It’s still there. Fill it til it overflows. It’s still there.  It. Will. Always. Be. There.

The Garden of Eden will not be restored. The fallen world remains.

And that’s okay. Well, it’s not *really* okay. It’s trauma. And trauma’s hell. But… it is what it is. It doesn’t have to be okay. It just is. And you have to learn to accept that it is. Over. And over. And over. You build up a life on the other side of it. You peer down into it and thank God you haven’t fallen into it. That you’re here. Looking back at it as you run, mile by mile.

I swallowed a vitamin yesterday. A really big vitamin. I’ve always been good at swallowing pills. So are my kids. Family skill. (baggy esophagus maybe? we’re not the most coordinated family so it’s certainly not that we have an especially athletic swallowing mechanism). The thing is, Jeremy raped me a lot of ways but the scariest one was the oral rape. Because I thought I would die. He would suffocate me and count to ten slowly and I thought he might just hold me there long enough to kill me and I’d never see my babies again. I felt so utterly powerless. I was so utterly powerless. He would tell me he was training the gag mechanism out of me.

It didn’t work and ever since then, I have had trouble swallowing certain things like big pills. Vitamins in particular I guess since he had me on a vitamin regimen of sorts. It wasn’t something I ever wanted to deal with. I  just took gummy vitamins. But yesterday my husband said, these are really good vitamins, maybe you could try and see. And so I did. I put this rather large vitamin and my probiotic capsule and my two medications in my mouth and took a big gulp of water and threw my head back. And they all went down. Down the hatch.

I felt so victorious. I thought, I wish I could tell someone. I was so happy that he’d now taken one less thing from me. I thought about telling people, though, and how I would need to explain that whole oral-rape-until-you-suffocate thing. And then I remembered the whole orally-raped-until-I-suffocated thing. And I felt so powerless. So utterly powerless. There in my living room, my babies’ toys strewn on the floor, the fireplace I love, the pictures of our wedding and our first communion at the Easter vigil and… I felt so terrified and so sad and… I thought to myself, a really awful thing happened to me. A freaky, awful thing. A thing no one deserves. That happened. It happened to me. And it can’t be undone.

The moment passed quickly. In a matter of seconds it was done and I was back to my life. To my beautiful fireplace and crazy bubalink babies and my devoted husband and I stumbling through Catholicism. And now I was doing all that with the benefit of a wonderful multivitamin.

You tell yourself, you need to stop running *from* the trauma and start running *towards* the good things. And the truth is, I do have runs where I think about the healthy habits I’m giving my kids and going on hikes with my husband, maybe learning tennis or kickboxing. How good it feels to be lighter on my feet, to get around easier, to know I’m probably going to dodge the bullet of diabetes type 2 and keep the arthritis at bay as long as I can. But sometimes I think of how far I’ve come. Sometimes I think of him, of her (the head of my medical school),  of the sickness in their hearts that makes them do the things they do. Of the happiness they tried to deny me.

They did, in a way. They took from me the naïve happiness I had then. They put a fault in my life. Made it into a before and after. But I have made a home on the other side. I am not hanging off the edge. I am not in the darkness of it. My happiness has given way to joy and wisdom and a greater love than I could have known. The fault is there to stay. And that’s okay. Well, it’s not okay. But it is. It is what it is. And after all, it really is a wonderful life.

Thank you for contacting the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section. This message acknowledges the receipt of your email

21 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by in Evil, outrage, PTSD, Rape, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

97b4387e5e4c8cb774f98aee73ea273d

Eight years ago, in the hot sticky month of June, I called the FBI field office in Pittsburgh to turn in a fellow medical student for trafficking a child. A three year old little girl, specifically. They never returned my call. So, I sat and typed it all out and emailed it to them on their website. I didn’t think I’d ever hear from them. So, I copy and pasted it onto an anonymous blog I was keeping at the time. I didn’t think he’d ever go to prison. And I thought he would probably kill me as he’d promised to do if ever I turned him in. No one in my life knew what had been going on for months. My ordeal. So I pasted it to my anonymous blog. Because you need to speak, no matter what. Because I needed to believe somewhere someone would read it and know my truth. And maybe if I died, the truth at least had a chance of coming out.

He went to prison. He’s in prison for 45 years now. In Arizona. I track him online on this federal prisons website where you can look up any prisoner by name (who knew such a thing existed? Funny how life goes). My victim advocate from the FBI, Bridget, has long since released me from her care, although I wasn’t clear on what she did anyway. When the judge sentenced him, sentenced Jeremy, Jeremy Noyes, he said Jeremy was one of the worst sadistic criminals he’d ever seen. You should be grateful, dear reader, you weren’t at his trial when they showed the images he had on his computer. You would never be the same again. You cannot imagine the evil men are capable of. Men that are medical students, future doctors. I was there. I was there in that beautiful courthouse with its arches and mezzanine (or was it a balcony? It was beautiful either way) when my rapist called me to the stand to question me (did I mention he fired his lawyer and represented himself? That I got the unique experience of being cross examined by my rapist?). There I sat in federal court in Erie, Pennsylvania. Just me and my rapist. And 12 jurors. And the press. And several lawyers. And all the people who just came to watch.

My school was not kind to me for turning this man in. And so, after all these years, I have finally found the courage and the energy to once again email the federal government. I’m once again afraid nothing will happen, so here I am on a blog. Once again. But this time it is not anonymous. I am not ashamed anymore. I am proud. I am a goddamned hero.

Go For It

15 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Evil, love, PTSD, Rape, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

I stepped out into the cold January air, the first real 5 degree-wind blowing-makes your face hurt winter day of the year. It was Martin Luther king day. The kids were off school and we’d gone to visit my parents for the day. I took Soldier Boy, The Ax, Princess and Our New Baby. Poobah and Tree stayed behind to work on the house. It was a nice day, admiring the newly remodeled kitchen my mother finally had after dreaming of it for forty years and getting to meet my sister’s new boyfriend, the chef. I caught them up on all the goings on at our house and my mother shared the latest from the various relatives. We talked politics a bit (Go Bernie! was the consensus). My mom offered me a nice crockpot too big for her empty nest and a Keurig the wrong color for her new kitchen, both of which I excitedly accepted. She told me to go through the old board games because they were throwing out whatever I didn’t want. I scored some Gumby Colorforms (remember those?), VCR Clue II, and Go For It, my favorite 1980s board game centered on accumulating red convertibles, hot tubs, and ski chalets: the good life, eighties style.

Our afternoon was wrapping up. The kids were getting cranky and it was time for us to go. So I gathered up an armful of the dusty board games and headed out to my car. And as I stepped out of my parents newly remade kitchen onto the familiar patio, the bitter cold air hit my face and suddenly I was in Erie.

Erie. January 2008. Class just let out and we’re walking to his apartment through the snow. The crunchy kind with a thin layer of ice on top that your foot catches on for a moment before sinking in. They say the Inuits have a hundred different words for snow, don’t they? (I don’t know if it’s true but it’s what they say anyway) I could not normally tell you much about what kind of snow there was on any particular day of my life years ago. I am not an Inuit of old, surviving in the Arctic north. Snow is not something of great importance to me. But those days, those memories, are not normal memories. They are not stored in the circuitry of my brain as normal memories are. And I am not now remembering that day. I am reliving it. I am there.

We are walking to his apartment to study and eat lunch. And maybe when we’re done he’ll rape me too. My stomach is in a knot. My chest is aching. My limbs are heavy and slightly numb. Not from the cold but from The Ordeal. My head is there but not there. How do you force yourself to walk to a violent sadist’s apartment? You will it. It is survival, moral spiritual survival. Protecting the young. You must. And so you do. Your will tells your legs to move and they do. They feel heavy and numb like they don’t belong to you but rather someone else. Because they must. For surely you would never go with this man so seemingly cooperative. Surely this isn’t happening. But it is.

I am afraid of what he will do when we get there. I am more afraid of the plans he has for his other victims, that I won’t find a way to stop him. He makes my whole being nauseous. Not just my stomach but my muscles and my head and my skin. My myocytes and epithelial cells. My heart and my spirit. Helpless. I am helpless with him. If I cannot stop what he has planned then I’m hopeless too. Powerless. Utterly alone in the universe. That is how it is in his apartment. Just me and him. Only one soul in the room. Mine. And he is trying to take it from me. His apartment has become the whole universe. At once a vast expanse and a vacuum. Just me and him. Nothing else, no one else.

I make him lunch and he talks about nutrition and he talks his madness all over me, coating me in its sticky thick tack. Cortisol is coursing through me. My pulse is quick. I am hypervigilent. I must be able to detect any changes to his mood so I can prepare for what’s next. The worst thing is to be caught off guard. Defenseless. I must cut the apples just so, but I must pay attention to the nuance of his speech: the tone of his voice, the rate, the cadence, the choice of words. His body language too. The way he carries himself, the tone of his muscles, the subtle change of expression on his face. He is a sociopath so he rarely shows anger. It is not so simple as that.

The irony of this is that he has brainwashed me into believing he can read me so easily, that he is always watching me and can tell when I’m lying and what I’m really thinking. He tells me he has researched it all thoroughly, how to tell if someone is lying. The direction their eyes move when answering questions, the rate their heart beats, the tone of their muscles. (But he really was terrible at it. I fooled him. He went down. He lost his life as he knew it. Why? Because he wasn’t hypervigilent. Why? Because he wasn’t afraid. He was arrogant. My fear saved me really. And allowed me to stop him. It saved my life and my soul.)

It pressed this moment into my memory too. This moment I am reliving now eight years later. In an instant. Yes all of this comes and passes in just a few seconds. And then just as suddenly I am back in 2016 packing up my car, hurrying to get back to Our New Baby before he starts fussing in his car seat.

I’m free of my prison. I have been PTSD free for a year now. I have my moments. I have my hours. But I am no longer trapped inside. I am free and I can now appreciate the fear for what it did for me then. It saved my soul. It stopped a sadist. And now I am free to live the good life, 2016 style.

The Waiting Room at Children’s Hospital

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

I’m sitting in the Children’s Hospital waiting room. Again. I’m here with The Ax this time (usually it’s Soldier Boy). We’re here to see Endocrine because he’s not growing very well. We see the specialist and she listens to our story and tells us that little Ax’s particular eating disorder is very strange. Maybe she doesn’t use the word strange. Maybe she says unusual or uncommon or not typical or not something we see very often. The exact wording is irrelevant. What matters is that I’ve found myself in a familiar place: getting unexpected bad news from a doctor about my child.

I’d been the one to request the endocrine referral from his PCP (my attending at the outpatient clinic my residency runs). He’d been seen by various doctors for his eating issues before. He’d been small for a few years. No one really thought it necessitated a visit to endocrine. I asked for the referral feeling like I must be overreacting, but also feeling I deserved the peace of mind an uneventful trip to the specialist would bring.

Little Ax had always been the healthy Yin to Soldier Boy’s multiple diagnoses Yang. I expected doctor visits for Soldier Boy to yield worrisome news. I’d learned to brace myself for it over the years. But this news, that little Ax might have something more wrong than I’d thought, came as a blow I hadn’t prepared for. My abdominal muscles were relaxed, my jaw slack. The punch landed and I went down like I had in the early days of the Soldier Boy medical saga.

They wanted bloodwork and an X-ray of his hand to assess growth trajectory. The results would take 7-10 days. She would call me herself to discuss them. I didn’t like the idea of the doctor calling personally with the results. Calling with normal results didn’t seem like a doctorly thing to do. Normal results don’t require explanation; there are no questions to field. If she was calling, it seemed like there was no hope of a normal outcome. I did not say any of this. My mind was relatively blank as minds so often are in the presence of physicians. We should come back in three months, she said, so The Ax could be weighed and measured again and she could get a better idea of how he was growing. Any questions? No, thank you for your help. They’ll direct you to the lab when you check out. X-ray is on the second floor.

We sat in the waiting room for the lab for an hour, Ax on his computer and me on my phone, texting all the interested parties awaiting the results of his appointment like it was election night. You hear the moms discussing what diagnosis brought them there. One mom of what appears to be a six month old baby boy relates he has cystic fibrosis to another mom there with her diabetic tween daughter. The life expectancy of those diagnosed with CF had increased significantly in recent years but is still much shorter than the typical person. This always happens in the waiting room at Children’s. You always find someone with a burden greater than yours, right when your pity party is in full swing.

The interesting thing about it that I’ve found out over the years is that a lot of the families I think are worse off than mine, think the same thing about me. There’s no precise hierarchy of the lost dreams we carry for our children. Some of us go into it stronger than others; some of us surprise ourselves with the strength we develop under the tensile stress of it all; some of us, I suppose, fall apart either for a time or completely.

A woman leaves the lab with her tiny newborn baby on her shoulder, her belly still swollen from the birth that couldn’t have place more than a week ago by the look of it. I remember when I was here with Soldier Boy when he was just a few days old. It’s a bad memory. I’d like to put some beautiful spiritual spin on it, but I can’t. Watching them put the needle into your tiny newborn’s arm is just an ugly thing. Having doctors tell you there is something very wrong with your perfect little newborn is heartbreaking. It’s not a break that ever completely mends.

I go to ask why it’s taking so long for us to be called and they tell me they paged us quite a while ago. My pager didn’t go off, I tell them. They offer no apology but tell me he will be called soon. The Ax is calm as the phlebotomist draws his blood, asking her questions about the meaning of the different colored tops on the vials she uses to gather his blood. She says he reminds her of her own son. I think that it’s a nice thing to say, but it’s a thought detached from feeling. My heart is in a sad place from long ago.

We finish and head to radiology for the X-ray of his hand. I remember taking Soldier Boy there for CTs and MRIs of his brain. It doesn’t feel like a memory; it feels like I am there. Is it possible to get PTSD from having a sick kid? This feels like a flashback. I remember how stifling the crowded waiting rooms full of kids and parents felt. That “Max and Ruby” had been playing on the waiting room TV that day of the first CT. I remember looking at the cartoon bunnies and commenting to Soldier Boy’s dad that it would be funny if one bunny began humping the other as our pet bunnies at home often did in their eternal battle for dominance. We laughed. We had to.

I think of it now as I look at the Ax happily chattering to someone he’s introduced himself to in the radiology waiting room. You have to laugh, I remind myself. There are so many more happy times than struggles for my kids. So many happy times ahead for them along with the struggles. Grieving demands our attention but we must make room for laughter too. Laugh now while you bide your time in the waiting room. Tomorrow has enough worries of its own.