Tag Archives: empowerment

America we’ve given you all and that’s not nothing (or Narcissus needs a drink)

11 Wednesday Mar 2020

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America
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
*
*
*

I have spent a lot of time reading about narcissism lately. I have my reasons I won’t go into here. An unexpected outcome of this research is the realization almost every politician in the Democratic primary is above average on the naricissim spectrum, some just as high as Trump. One in particular. The one who had to drop his bid in 1988 because he was exposed as a pathological liar and plagiarist. The one whose toxic masculinity led him to challenge someone to a fist fight recently. The one who has assured the billionaires “nothing will change.” And a relationship with a narcissist, my dear reader, only ends one of two ways: you wake up and leave or they suck the life out of you. The Democratic electorate has chosen the latter. It is narcissist versus narcissist in 2020 (it has been before, to be fair) . We will all lose no matter which one wins. If Biden wins, we are left with an America still under the conditions that created Trump and we will either get another Trump or …. Trump. Do you really think leaving the White House will make Trump go away? He has created a movement and they will follow him where he leads. The presidency,  my dear reader, may become significantly less relevant. The question is, will the movement Bernie is driving remain intact to counter it?

 

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I think of the people most affected by all this and I cry. My addiction patients in rural Pennsylvania, their children. They don’t even realize just how different much of America is living. And most of America doesn’t realize how they’re living. If they did, I’d like to think things would be different. But narcissists are very good at gaslighting and projecting and lying. Lying especially. Lots of lying. And if you’re a decent, feeling, empathetic human being, it is hard to resist. It is hard for for you to conceive that such a person could exist. Someone with no empathy and no remorse. Entirely self serving with nothing to limit what they’ll do to get it. Try to imagine. It should scare you. Terrify you.

I believe most Americans are decent people trying to get by in the face of a lot of hardship. I see it in my office everyday. Not just my most vulnerable patients, my middle class medical marijuana patients too. The cop with PTSD who had to retire because of it and now has no insurance or income to pay for the therapy he so badly needs. The single mom of an adult son with autism, trying to get services that aren’t there, trapped in her house. Chronic pain patients that were abruptly kicked off their pain meds once doctors started facing consequences for over-prescribing, not offered any help for withdrawal or to manage their pain. And I see the upper middle class patients who benefit from the system but have so much anxiety and depression, the money does them no good. And still they hold onto it tightly, unwilling to see letting some of it go would not only save so many struggling; it would save them too.

Greed is an illness. An ugly dark emptiness that cannot be filled and will not stop making you hunger for more. Like any addiction. Are the heads of the pharmaceutical companieds just projecting then? Turning so many into addicts so they can see themselves? And Trump, who will never have enough cheering angry supporters or enough money. He pulls the worst from us, feeding off negative emotions and chaos as narcissists do. Projecting onto America the darkness inside of him.

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I do not mean for this post to sadden you or leave you feeling hopeless. Indeed, that is exactly what a narcissist wants. I want you to see that once you know you’re dealing with a narcissist, you begin your steps towards recovery. Leaving is not easy. They will try to suck you back in. They will love bomb you, bring you flowers and tell you how wonderful you are. But if you stay strong, it gets easier in time. And the best part? The thing narcissists hate most is someone who heals and is happy and strong. Our revenge would be a healthcare system that takes care of us, universal childcare, a Green New Deal, a living wage, an end to mass incarceration. Our revenge would be joy. Like an army of Care Bears shooting out beams of love and kindness and hope from our chests. They would keep trying, but with no one to reflect their image back to them, narcissists wither. Like Narcissist himself, when the reflecting pool they’re so addicted to dries up, so do they. And we, America, will have won.

***

America, by Allen Ginsburg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don’t really want to go to war.
America its them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
Berkeley, January 17, 1956

Good Friends Are Hard to Find (or, My Brother from Another Mother) (or, Tacos Fall Apart Sometimes and We Still Love Them)

01 Sunday Mar 2020

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It’s the Kalenda of March today. You may have heard of the Ides of March (especially if you took Latin at Indiana Senior High like I did) but probably not the Kalends of March. It is the first day of the month. It comes from the same roots as the word calendar (thank you, Latin class. You rock) and was part of the newly formed Roman calendar which was no longer lunar like all those before it (see, for instance, the Hebrew calendar which leads to holidays falling on different days each year). The lunar year is made up of equal months that follow the waxing and waning moon. The Roman calendar had to make up the idea of a Leap Year to reconcile its imperfection.

And so here we are on the Kalends of March, the day after February 29th. That pesky day that tries to make up for the illogic of the Roman calendar. The moon and it’s cycles have always been linked to the Divine Feminine and Nature, so it is no surprise the Romans wanted it squashed. 

March is my birthday month. I will be 41 on the 24th, a few days after the spring solstice. My 40th year has been intense, to say the least.

Some good, some bad, most of it both. 

With me through all the ups and downs have been a few people I managed to stay close to despite the relative isolation I found myself in in recent years. One is a wonderful fellow PANDAS mom, one a good friend from college who was with me through the Jeremy ordeal, and one is my friend and coworker, Sam (he says I can tell you his name. I always get consent, dear reader).

Sam came to my practice at the suggestion of my husband. He recruited him. And for that I am eternally grateful. Sam is warm and sunny and kind and just fills you with positive energy from the second you meet him, whether by person or over the phone as many of our patients do. I cannot tell you how many patients pause in their appointments and say, I have to tell you Sam is wonderful. I say, oh I know! And they look at me very seriously and say, No, I mean it. Truly wonderful, (as though I’m not convinced) I was so nervous when I called here and he made me feel so comfortable and so much better. Never let that one go! I’ve even had patients try to hire him away from me (no joke). They send him chocolate covered strawberries and give him birthday gifts. When I told our grove city patients, who have only talked to Sam on the phone since he doesn’t come up to the grove city office with me, that he was coming up in March, it was like I’d told them a celebrity was coming. The excitement was palpable and real. 

Sam was with me through a lot this year and always there however I needed him to be. He never tried to tell me what to do as I tortured over some big decisions. He listened. He heard me and allowed me to talk it out to figure out the answers I already knew deep inside. He laughed with me. He sat with me as I cried. We drank champagne sometimes; other times we talked about how damn unfair some of our patients lives are and how we wish we could do more. 

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More than once he has run something badly needed to my house at 10 at night (not sure what my neighbors thought he was putting in my mailbox but I can assure you it was all perfectly legal). More than once he has either run my son Mies to school when he missed his van, run my office with me completely unavailable tied up in court, run inconvenient errands for me or ordered me rose water pistachio ice cream (vegan if course) when I really really needed it (and run it over to my house of course. The man runs). 

Sometimes we bitch about men together, even though Sam is a man. Sometimes he lets me bitch about women to him, even though I am myself in fact a woman. I know there’s nothing I can say to Sam that will make him judge me or love me any less. (Well maybe there’s something but it would have to be pretty extreme). 

Sam has reminded me I am a good person. That there are parts of myself I’ve pushed down so many years that deserved to rise back to the surface. That it’s okay to be a contradiction. That it’s okay to not be okay. Because everything is going to be okay. And it is. 

So it is not just female friendship I am reveling in now. The Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine are in us all. We must embrace both. Sam does that beautifully. He is a fabulous moon, orbiting with me. I no longer orbit any person. But I make my way through space , through the cycles, pulling the tide in and out, with some wonderful fellow celestial bodies. You can keep your Leap Day. We will take the solstice and the mother moon (and some champagne lunches from time to time).

Love that seeps into your marrow

27 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in empathy, kids, love, parenting, Uncategorized

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I am sitting here at my old dining room table but my mind is somewhere else. This table that once held so much meaning, about the past and about the future, now feels so hollow and dead. This house is no longer my home. Was it ever? It was lonely. Lonely house, lonely bed, lonely heart. How different things are now.

My heart is full. My bed no longer feels lonely. My house is very much a warm and cozy home. Something this house never was. 

Couple at a table holding hands

Lesbian couple at a table holding hands

As I wrote about here, I have recently found a soul connection with a good female friend. It is a spiritual thing, love. When you are truly connected, feel known and understood, it is not something of the surface. Not hollow. It goes into your heart and soul and seeps deep into your bones to the marrow, into the osteocytes and osteoclasts and osteoblasts. Into the matrix of your skeleton, changing your vibration and energy and that of those around you. It is contagious. It resonates through my house and my children. 

And so my mind is somewhere else as I sit at this table I once sat at, but which was never mine. A table where many words were spoken but few actually heard. We have a very different table now. One where all of us are heard. And none of us are alone.

Fish oil and marshmallow foldovers will be served at our Gala banquet

10 Saturday Feb 2018

Posted by in autism, PTSD, Rape, special needs, Uncategorized

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I had fish oil the other day for the first time in a decade. I’d bought an especially high quality one called OmegaCure for my two littlest ones who can’t swallow pills and was excited when it arrived. It is flavorless according to what I’d heard from my sources and I was hopeful I could get it past them. I made them each a peanut butter and marshmallow foldover and put a glug in between the peanut butter and mini marshmallows. They gobbled it right up. Now, marshamllows are such a treat for them it’s possible I could have put just about anything in there and they’d still have inhaled it. But I was pretty confident it was due to the true flavorlessness of the oil. The next morning I opened the fridge to get some berries out for my morning smoothie and the beautiful glass bottle of golden oil was there shimmering at me. I thought, why not put a tablespoon in my smoothie? And I did. And I drank it. I ran into the laundry room and excitedly told my husband the news.

“I had fish oil!”

Silence

“I had fish oil! For the first time since 2008!”

Silence

More laundry folding

“Ya know?”

Silence. Folding,

“Since Jeremy. I couldn’t take it because of the trauma…”

“Ok good.”

Clearly not something that broke his usual daily laundry folding routine

For me, it’s a big deal. For me, the question “why not put a tablespoon in my smoothie,” has a lot of answers.

The first time I asked that question and ended up vomiting was in 2012. I was pregnant with my daughter Lena and knew I should be taking fish oil heavy in DHA for brain development. It was even more important for me than a lot of moms because I already had a son with autism and malformation of his brain and optic nerves which meant any baby I carried was at higher risk for having issues and needed the best possible start, including fish oil, folic acid and vitamin D. I managed the vitamins fine but the fish oil did me in. When my husband asked me why I wasn’t taking the fish oil capsules he’d gotten me, I had to admit to myself I wasn’t throwing them up because I was pregnant. It was because of *him*. Jeremy. The Ordeal.

No big story attached to it. Jeremy made me take fish oil capsules daily, amongst his other weirdities. Some people are health nuts. He was a health sociopath.

I’ve attempted fish oil a few times since then and it was always a No Go. Couldn’t bring myself to swallow them. The one time I forced myself to swallow them and keep them down, the resultant fishy burps sent me into a daylong relapsing remitting flashback. From that point on, I decided I was going to concede the battle for fish oil. We lose certain things to trauma. It just is. You have to fight to save the things that really matter but you have to learn to let go of the things you can afford to. Lose the battle, win the war. And all that.

But as I stood peering into my fridge this week, that fish oil looked so lovely. (Like nectar collected by little hummingbirds and their magical fairy friends. I’m not kidding. See for yourself, it’s gorgeous.)And I know my kids need me healthy. And so, I figured, why not? What’s the worse that could happen? A day of fishy burp induced flashbacks again? I’ll live.

No fish burps and no flashbacks. It was a little hard to get myself to drink it, I admit. I’ve never been so afraid of a smoothie. But my two littles were sitting there with me at the table watching and I knew I had to play it cool. So down the hatch it went. And stayed.

2018 is a big year as far as my trauma goes. A decade since the trauma started, since I turned him in, since his arrest, since my school initiated their illegal persecution of me for my decision to turn him in, since I got the school’s suspension overturned, since the PTSD began.

It’s not a sad thing. It’s a triumphant thing, I’ve decided to call it my Gala Year. The resumption of fish oil is just the beginning. There’s going to be a whole calendar full of activities commemorating the events, remembering the heroes and making sure it doesn’t happen again.

I was looking for a race to run today. Now that I’m taking fish oil, by God, I ought to be ready to start running again and eat healthy and all that, right? It’s going to take a good while to get me in shape so I Googled “races november 2018 pittsburgh” to give myself ten months. I happened upon one of those obstacle races which I’ve always had an interest in despite being painfully uncoordinated. And it was a charity run for a group that serves people for autism. Perfect, I thought, I can motivate myself to run by raising money for autism. But then when I looked into it further, it wasn’t in November and wasn’t in Pittsburgh after all (thanks Google). It’s called the Beast on the Bay and it’s on Presque Isle in September. Presque Isle, Erie PA. The city of My Ordeal. The home of Sylvia Ferretti. She who sought to shame me out of being a doctor.

And so, please note on your calendar of Gala Year events, the date of September 8th. I will be completing the Beast to raise money for autism services and for The Exodus Road, a nonprofit group that rescues sex slaves throughout southeast Asia, India, and the US using a network of covert surveillance teams and individuals. (i.e. Jeremy Hunters). It will be my first time returning to Erie since his trial in February of 2011 so I imagine there were will be other Gala events added to the calendar for that weekend. Be sure to stay tuned.

2018 will mostly be comprised of healing my children of PANDAS and building up my practice. Of watching my Auggie learn to speak and sending my Lena to kindergarten. Seeing my Max become an excellent cellist and trying not to ball my eyes out on my Mies’s first day of high school (getting dizzy just typing those words). Fighting for my PANDAS patients’ recovery and learning all I can to defeat the Bear once and for all. But it will be my Gala Year too. Let the festivities begin.

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

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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.

The demons they won’t fight

14 Friday Oct 2016

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When I was fifteen, I met a wonderful, intense, intelligent. creative, amazing, intoxicating group of boys who made me feel so alive. They swore and smoked cigarettes and drank beer and smoked pot out of a Coke can bowl. They were nothing like me. I was a quiet, shy girl who’d never sworn or done anything else good girls aren’t supposed to.

I spent the next three years with them, going on adventures always exciting and sometimes terrifying. They introduced me to William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and E.E. Cummings. To grunge and industrial and Irvine Welsh and surrealist art. We were so intensely alive. In love. All of us.

They also did a lot of drugs during these years. I did not. I started to swear, I’ll admit, but I wasn’t into drugs. I was the permanent designated driver for three years straight. I was into political activism and applying to college and various other positive activities they thought were a waste of time. They started out with just pot and beer. They made fun of stoners and burnouts. Kids who did heroin and crack and too much acid. But by the end of high school, they were the kids doing crack and meth and tripping on shrooms.

One didn’t graduate. Another dropped out of college the third day. Another dropped out a year or two later. They all descended into more and more drugs and alcoholism. I would see the poetry and genius in them every now and then but it became less and less common. I knew they were in there somewhere. Somewhere. Deep inside.

I wanted to help them. Wanted to save them. I tried. They knew they needed to change and they would try every now and then to quit. They would try giving up beer and just drinking liquor. Giving up pot and just drinking. Giving up alcohol and just smoking pot. Giving up cocaine and just taking pills. It never worked.

I felt bad for them. I knew there was a sadness in them so deep and so wide. They were trying to fill it with drugs. I wanted to save them from that darkness. They were capable of so much. I loved them so much. But it wasn’t enough.

I realized one day that they loved drugs more than they loved me. More than they loved each other. Maybe it was the night they let one of their friends die from an overdose rather than dump him at the ER because they were afraid of getting caught and I was the only one who seemed to care. Maybe it was no special day in particular. I looked at them and knew. Knew they loved drugs more and it was time to let them go. As much as I loved them, they didn’t really love me anymore. You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved and all that. It was time to let go.

People criticized me for it. Said I should have helped them more. How could I abandon my poor lost friends like that. And I’ll admit it made me sad at the time. But I never regretted doing it. Never regretted saving myself. Never doubted the fact that they would never change.

A time like this comes to all the relationships we end in life. The day you figure out the person you love, loves something or someone else more than they love you and that’s not all right. You stop asking, do they love me or not? They do, but not enough. They do not love you more than their dysfunction, the demons they won’t fight.

When you let them go and with them your guilt, you are light. You are free. You have fought the good fight and given them your best. And now you are free. For better things.

Go For It

15 Monday Feb 2016

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

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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.

We Liked You Better When You Didn’t Talk So Much: Life After PTSD (a.k.a. after your fasciotomy for compartment syndrome of the soul)

24 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by in doctors, empathy, kids, outrage, PTSD, residency

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Compartment Syndrome with Fasciotomy Procedure

It’s been four months since I recovered from my seven year bout of PTSD. (See previous entries of my blog for real time coverage of the recovery process). My coworkers don’t really know I had PTSD (although I did give a talk on PTSD and tell them the reason I was giving it was because I had it, I think they either weren’t paying attention or blocked it out). They just know that all of a sudden a few months ago I stopped being so quiet and agreeable all the time. At first they thought it was great. I’d blossomed. Developed self-confidence, gotten a backbone. They assumed it to be the result of residency training. But as the months have gone on and I’ve become more and more my true self, they’ve started commenting to me they miss the old quiet me.

I’m a little too opinonated, they say. Talk a little too much now. I’m too hard on the interns. I’m angry, they say. Well folks, what I really am is … me. The real me not suffocating under PTSD. The real me not constantly trying to avoid the bad things I think are coming. The real me who isn’t convinced I’m going to get kicked out of the medical profession if I let on to who I am.

I am indeed angry at times. Unapologetically angry. Righteously angry. Old testament angry. Jesus turning over the money changers table angry. Malcolm X I’m-done-begging-for-crumbs angry. No apologies.

I am hard on the interns. Hard on them like my senior residents were hard on me. I thank God my seniors were so hard on me. Guess what? We’re training them to be doctors. We’re not at the brownie jamboree seeing how many friendship bracelets we can collect. They’re here to learn to be excellent doctors: thorough, hard-working, devoted, compassionate physicians who think things through and can communicate and lead. Some interns need more nurturing than others, but even the most fragile (hi, I had freaking PTSD when I was an intern. I was about as fragile as they come) needs to be held to a high standard. We owe it to them and every patient they will ever treat.

I do talk a lot and have a lot of opinions. It’s not that I have a lot of opinions that bothers them though. I haven’t met many doctors who don’t have a lot of opinions they feel you must be dying to hear all about. What bothers them is that my opinions disagree with theirs. I don’t find their sexist jokes funny or even acceptable. I’m really such a drag, I know. But I’m 36 and I have a daughter and I’m done tolerating that crap.  The male residents are assertive while the female ones are called aggressive and told to tone it down for the same behavior. The male residents really hold the line and don’t take shit while the female residents are told to calm down and lighten up when we do the same thing. To hell with that.

It’s possible I’m a little overly zealous with the assertiveness and rightous anger right now as I delight in my recovery, but can you blame me? PTSD is hell. You’re not dead but you’re only technically alive. I’ve got seven years of pent up thoughts, words, feelings, and actions here.

In my defense, it’s not all anger and thunder bolts around me. I have a lot of joy. I’ve made a lot of progress on forgiveness (entry on that to come). I’m just not PTSD Barbie anymore, putting all my energy into pleasing everyone and always agreeing and going along and not complaining and working myself to exhaustion because I’m afraid everything’s going to fall apart at any moment.

My husband and I met when I was in the thick of the PTSD so he’s had a little bit of a switch-a-roo pulled on him. He always wished I’d be more assertive and talk more, but , as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.

The thing that’s frustrating about all of this for me is that I’ve been given this amazing gift. PTSD was hell. I can’t tell you how much of the past seven years I had spent wishing I could die. Knowing I couldn’t kill myself because of my kids and asking God why he would put me in that position. The blackness inside of you. The expansive emptiness that feels like it will break you apart. The loneliness you feel like you just can’t bear. And there’s no end in sight. There’s no hope. The fear. Every noise makes your heart race. Do you know how many times your pager goes off a year as a resident? Do you know what it’s like to feel terrifed every time it does just because of the sound it makes? To not be able to trust anyone, not even your husband. To not let yourself open your heart to your kids because you’re expecting them to be gone any minute. To go on psych med after psych med after psych med looking for an answer and all they do is make you tired and remind you you’re crazy.

And I finally escape all that and the people I work with, the physicians I work with, they tell me they like me better the way I was. So, you’ll have to excuse me if I’m unapologetic. If I relish giving them a piece of my mind when it comes to what is right. Silence does not protect us, it fills us with its void until the tensile strength of the matter of us gives out. It’s like compartment syndrome of the soul. You must release the pressure surgically and when you do, sometimes things burst forth and get messy. But it’s the only hope of saving the limb. The real me has come back out and I couldn’t stuff her back in to the old necrotic shell even if I wanted to. And I most definitely do not want to.

Of Angels and Devils

22 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by in christianity, doctors, empathy, Evil, outrage, PTSD, Rape, Sin

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gelfand

From January 2015:

Dr. Steven Gelfand died on January 18th after a brief battle with cancer. He was 66 years old. He was also amazing.

I’m going to tell you about him. And just from reading about it, you’ll be better off for having known what little I can tell you here.

I met Dr. Gelfand July of 2009. He was the attending of my very first clinical rotation as a medical student. The first two years of med school are spent in the classroom and the last two years are spent on rotation. You get to leave the classroom and spend time actually doing medicine.

I’d had PTSD for about a year at this point. My perpetrator, a fellow medical student, had been arrested in August 2008. My trauma officially ended with his arrest I suppose, and then came the PTSD.

After he was arrested, my medical school became upset with me. You see, the FBI released my name (even though they didn’t need to) and implied a lot of things about my personal life, sex life, and mental health in the affidavit they used to arrest the sociopathic child molestor I’d turned in. Some of what they wrote about me was accurate and some of it wasn’t. Two things made very clear by this affidavit were:
1. He was a dangerous sadistic pedophile
2. I had risked my life and the lives of my children to turn him in.

I’d like to think a medical school, an institution charged with shaping the physicians we place our trust in and rely on for our lives and health, would be appreciative of a future doctor risking her life and the lives of her children to stop a fellow future doctor who is a sadistic pedophile from hurting any more women or children. But that’s not how it went.

Quite the opposite.

My school chose to punish me instead. They placed me on probation for having morals below the standards of the community (in reference to the affidavit’s inference that I had engaged in consensual, kinky sex with the perpetrator before The Ordeal began). More than this, they waged psychological warfare on me. They brought in a speaker from the state board of medicine (and an alum of the school) who spoke in front of the entire student body about me, saying I really should leave med school now because I wasn’t fit to be a doctor. Warning them not to be like me. A sexually immoral person. The head of my school told me I would never be a doctor. She said no doctor would take someone like me on for clinical rotations and that even if I somehow managed to become a doctor, I would never have patients because I was so disgusting, they wouldn’t want me touching them.

Such cruel words coming from the head of your medical school, coming to you in an acute post-traumatic state, has such an impact. I didn’t even realize at the time how much I believed her.

I was able to get a lawyer and, after a legal battle, get her off my back (but not before suffering the utter humiliation of being forced to apologize for my behavior to the faculty of my school.) But she had gotten inside of my post-traumatic soul and planted herself there.

Fast forward a year to my first day of clinical rotations. The day she said would never come.

The PTSD had obliterated my self-confidence. Deep inside I was afraid she was right, that I wasn’t going to make it and I should have cut my losses when I had the chance.

I know there is a God because it cannot be chance that I wound up on Dr. Gelfand’s doorstep. By the end of my first day with him he’d shared with me that he had no respect for the head of my school. In fact, he told me, he’d once told her to go f*** herself. He was a Jewish, cursing, bold as all hell, certified angel.

He told me she had once punished a medical student he had rotating with him after he gave the student time off to spend with her mother who was dying of cancer. He responded by sharing his feelings as above.

I ended up telling him what had happened to me. The brave deed I’d done and the evil she’d paid me with. He told me I’d done a courageous thing, the right thing. And he told me not to tell any other doctors like I’d just told him. It could ruin my medical career.

Over the next two years, he became my two special needs sons’ neuropsychiatrist. He was, by far, the best doctor they’ve ever had. He became a mentor for me too. He told me I was going to be a great doctor. And part of me actually believed him somehow.

He was a tough attending. He let you know every single detail you got wrong. But he also let you know when you got something right. And when he did, it really meant something.

He went into medicine for the right reason. He cared about his patients and worked for and advocated for them fiercely. He was good and he knew it, and he earned it.

Dr. Gelfand was right that I shouldn’t tell the other doctors I would be rotating with what she’d done to me. It wasn’t the time for it. She still had the power to end my career. I wasn’t emotionally ready to speak publicly about it yet either.

But I have been healed of my PTSD after seven long years. I am getting ready to graduate from a wonderful, supportive residency. And I’ve never been one to keep quiet.

It was Martin Luther King day on Monday so we talked to our kids about the civil rights movement. We talked about the turning points like Rosa Parks and how those were just moments that sparked off a movement that ha been building for a long time. My son asked me why those particular events set things in motion and I told him no one could say for sure.

The passing of this amazing man has changed things for me. Something has been brewing within me that would inevitably, eventually come out. I didn’t know when.

The silence ends now.

Jeremy Noyes raped me, tortured me, threatened to kill me and my babies. My medical school punished me for risking all of that to do what is right as a physician and as a person. He is now serving 45 years in federal prison. What my school did was wrong and dangerous. They sent a clear message to that school full of future doctors that turning in a child predator could cost you your career. It was unethical, immoral, and unacceptable.

Your seven years is up, LECOM. Let’s talk.

New Year New You! (How Ima Got Her Groove Back)

10 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by in empathy, kids, love, medicine, my awesome husband, parenting, PTSD, Rape

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I found this idea on Pinterest for keeping a jar where you write down happy/funny things that happen throughout the year and put them in this jar. I believe it advised a big jar (with the assumption being you’ll have lots of good things happening I suppose). You open the jar up at the end of the year and read over all the little happy moments you otherwise might have forgotten. The woman who’d pinned it had written it was a “super cute idea !!!!” and that she was definitely going to try it.

I pitched the idea to Poobah and he liked it (although he didn’t call it super cute or exclaim). So I took the large clear plastic teddy bear shaped animal cracker jar and dumped the animal crackers out into a bag (they’ve been sitting uneaten in the jar for 3 months so why not keep them uneaten in a different container a little longer) and wrote 2015 on the bear’s tummy with a Sharpy.

As I did so, I thought, why only write down the happy times? Why not the bad times too? It was January first and I was heading to work soon. I wasn’t very cheery.

But it wasn’t just working on a holiday that made me think that. I’d been bogged down in PTSD and working crazy hours and stress and financial problems and family discord. Bogged down for a while.

I felt like there wouldn’t be much to put in the jar.

I said goodbye to my husband and kids and headed to the hospital. Holidays can be slow because people put off going to the hospital on a holiday if they can, but it’s been a particularly busy year for hospital medicine because of all the influenza. I expected I’d be fairly busy and hoped it wouldn’t be any worse than that. I hoped no patients crashed. I hoped for some time to think.

Earlier in the day, Poobah and the kids and I had gathered in the living room around our old school fake Christmas tree (the kind that really do look fake and aren’t “pre-lit” and don’t have green concentrated pine scent aroma sticks discretely hung on a strategically chosen back branch) to continue a tradition my sister Nicci and I had started when I was still in high school. Every New Years we make predictions for the upcoming year and then the following year we read over them and see who got the most right. We also talk about things that happened over the past year that were unexpected.

We’d each made three predictions but I wanted some time before I went and started the admissions to write down a few more and think about the year ahead.

I started writing and this is what came out:
I need to move forward. But these next 6 months are going to be exhausting. I’m not sure what to do. I wish it were a simpler tale. I wish I could figure it out.
Where did it begin? Before I was born? If it did, then what?

We all seek to be an individual with self-esteem
There are those who stand in the way
And so we assert to be ourselves in maladaptive ways
Because of the innate drive towards maturity

Malcolm has something special in him. Malcolm could change the world.
He said he wants to be an astronaut so he can change the world.

Mies has this amazingly unique combination of traits.

They’re extraordinary.

Maybe I am too.

And with those four little words, I got my groove back. I didn’t just get my groove back from before Jeremy Noyes traumatized me seven years ago or before my medical school rubbed salt in the spiritual wound and made it stick. I mean I got my groove back from Way back.

It’s a process, of course, but it is set in motion. It is inevitable. The rate limiting step of the reaction has been overcome and the chemical cascade is in full swing.

I’ve spent most of my precious little free time since then wading through shame and heartache, cleaning out every dark corner of the past 35 years. It’s amazing all the things I’ve been ashamed of over the years. It’s amazing how ashamed I still felt now, decades later, simply writing out the words different people have said to me. I’ve done that sort of thing before, sitting and trying to process bad memories. But the difference this time is that I finally believed that I didn’t deserve any of it. I finally believed I’m extraordinary and so deserving of love and safety and joy, it’s ridiculous.

The words lost their power over me. Those people lost their power over me.

There are things I’ve done in my life I’m ashamed of and I sat with those too. Some of them I reminded myself I had no control over (feeling ashamed I “let” myself be raped, for instance), some I decided are just inevitable mistakes of youth, and some I had to forgive myself for. I regret very little as a general rule, but the things I’ve done that have hurt people, really hurt them, I do regret, and I had to forgive myself and let go of the shame.

Another inevitable piece of it is that I am losing the extra weight I have clung to for many years. It’s time to let it go and so I am. I feel hungry but it doesn’t distress me because it’s what’s supposed to be.

I’ve recovered from political amnesia and am reading feminists and progressives and anarachists again. I’m engaging with people about things that matter. I’m throwing a hundred evolving ideas out to my husband on everything our future holds after we graduate this June.

It’s not that I’m becoming a whole new person. It’s that I’m returning to being myself. I’m doing what we are all made to do: becoming more myself and finding what it is I am supposed to be doing to make the world a better place.

I look at my two year old daughter and see she’s there. She’s got her groove on. She knows what she thinks and wants and feels and she lets you know it. She’s engaged with everything and everyone she comes in contact with. She’s alive. She’s in the flow.

I want to do everything I can to keep her there as much as possible. I want to help all my kids find their flow. And anyone else I can. Because that’s what life is. But I see now, it’s not selfish to enjoy having my own groove on. Quite the opposite. Flow begets flow.

And so, the other day, I took a little green slip of paper next to the empty animal cracker jar and I wrote the first memory of 2015: January 1st Ima got her groove back. (our kids call me Ima. I’ll tell you about it some time)

This is for my husband now: My name is Elizabeth Spaar and 2015 is the year I got my groove back