Tag Archives: love

No Fear in (I) Love (New York)–or, Our Lady of Perpetual Selfies

12 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by in Catholicism, love, New York City, romance

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I got to go to New York this week. I love New York. Well, to visit anyway. Wasn’t so crazy about living there in grad school, but glad I did it. I feel very comfortable getting around the city when I visit now. And it stirs up a lot of happy memories.

I planned my trip carefully. There wasn’t much free time outside the conference I was there for, but I made the most of it. I went straight to Chinatown from Penn Station when my train got in. wonton garden. Go there the next time you’re in New York. Damn good Chinese comfort food.

I bought some Asian pears from a fruit stand on the sidewalk on my way there like I used to when I lived there. I took in the energy of the city. Whether you love New York or hate it, you have to admit it has a life to it that you feel in your cells.

I went to the top of Rockefeller Center before I left. I was the first one in line actually so I stood on top of New York by myself for a moment. I’m not one for views to be honest with you. it drives my poor husband crazy sometimes. He’s big on views. We used to go on hikes and get to the top of a big hill or a small mountain and he’d say, “Look at that view!” He couldn’t believe how underwhelmed I was. Guess I’m not a visual person.

I looked at the city below me and took pictures. Got some panoramic shots for my son Max. He’s a big fan of panoramic pictures. Guess he is a visual person.

I was hoping, quite cliché-ly, that going up there would help give me some perspective on my life.

I’ve been exhausted and overwhelmed lately, Taking in the suffering of addiction and PANDAS patients is draining sometimes. A lot of my patients have been having especially bad weeks lately.

And so has Max.

Sometimes it feels impossible. Like I’m living the Book of Job. I’m sure we all feel that way sometimes. Most of us anyway. Just one difficulty on top of another. Enough already.

It helped to get away from Verona, to spend time with a group of entirely new people, to spend some time alone too. Some calm and stillness.

Standing on top of New York wasn’t especially helpful though. Not my thing. Mountains, buildings, planes. Views don’t do it for me.

I stopped at a French bakery to get my sweetie some sweets and then on to my last stop before catching the train home. Back to reality.

I went to St. Patrick’s. St. Patrick’s is where I found God 15 years ago when I was 23. It wasn’t intentional. I went as a tourist, but from the moment I entered, it hit me. And I’ve never been the same.

I walked in now, 15 years and what feels like a few lifetimes later. I decided to pray by the statue dedicated to the Holy Family. Our family has not had peace for so long. We need peace so desperately in our house. I put my candle offering in and went to light my candle, to carry my prayers up to Heaven long after I’d left the Cathedral and headed home. But a tourist using a selfie stick and her phone to take pictures pushed me out of the way so she could extend her selfie stick over the candle and get a good shot of the statue. Really? Do you get at least a few minutes in Purgatory for that? I of course instantly forgave her and moved over to the candles on the other side and said my prayers and left my offering. I prayed for peace.

I then went to my favorite place in St. Patrick’s, the painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe. An area generally occupied by immigrants from various parts of Latin America. And me. She’s the only vision of Mary ever to appear where Mary is pregnant. So very… motherly.

Mary’s a mom so I know she gets me. So I let it all out. Told her everything while tears streamed down my cheeks and tourists walked by. I asked her for some rather specific answers, not expecting an immediate reply, but Mary’s an awesome mom and got right down to it.

Insight into who I am and how to treat my children and my patients. And insight into what is really at the heart of these things that trouble us all.

I feel renewed. Centered. In terms of my family and my medical practice. I have been living fearfully but there is no fear in love. I have not wanted to take care of myself, to be happy, because it seems selfish to take care of myself when my baby can’t, when so many of my patients and their families can’t.

It’s not a sustainable way to live. And it’s not good for my patients or my kids. I have known this intellectually for a long time. But it was always in my head, an idea unrealized, without form.

In the Catholic Church we are sensual. Protestants have formless ideas, a weekly service with a sermon that nourishes the mind. But Christ was both fully Man and fully God. We are physical creatures in this world. And so we have sacraments and incense and statues. Monks chanting and and holy water and the body and blood of Christ physically within us.

It is this smelling, hearing, tasting, touching, seeing that evokes the presence of God in us. Physical creatures seeking to know something so hard to grasp. I got up from the kneeler and looked at Our Lady one last time. I looked up at the great stone arches high above me. Took in the stained glass images of Christ and the Saints. And I felt so… protected, content, loved. Like I was home. The way a perfect home would be. What home should be. Peaceful and warm. A place you can be completely vulnerable and know you will be safe.

I realize something now. It is not that I’m not a visual person or I don’t like views. It’s that I like to look up instead of looking down. Not to see myself high above the small world below but to see the vastness of it all above and feel how small I really am. Part of something much bigger. Something very good.

No fear in love.

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.

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

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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.

joy is a choice

19 Monday Dec 2016

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I have been on a diet for a few months now. I’ve lost 30 pounds. Losing steadily week by week. And then a few weeks ago I began to struggle. I stepped on the scale fo r my weekly weigh-in the day after Thanksgiving and had only lost 0.8 pounds. I was upset. I was pissed. This was not acceptable.

I decided I was going to show my diet who was boss. So, I began a fast. I wasn’t not eating at all, I reasoned. And really, Advent is a time you’re supposed to fast anyway, I reasoned. I was, of course, full of shit. I ate very very little for a week and, not surprisingly, when I stepped on that scale a week later I had lost 8 pounds. Eight pounds! In a week! Woo hoo! I’ll be at fighting weight in a few weeks!

I imagine you can guess what comes next.

I continued my oh-so-religious-not-unhealthy-at-all “fast” a few more days and then I crashed. As happens. I ate a whole lotta junk. So, I told myself, well, I’ll just go back to the weight watchers. 30 points a day. fruits and veggies are 0 points. I’ll just go back to that and then I won’t regain the 8 pounds. Still dreaming of the holy grail of being at Goal Weight.  I reasoned that since I don’t have any clothes that fit me right now and since I can’t justify buying any new clothes until I am at my end weight, why it only made sense that I really *needed* to lost 3-5 pounds a week instead of that BS “1-2 pounds a week for healthy weight loss” they were always selling.

I imagine you can guess what comes next.

I didn’t stick to my 30 points. I bargained with myself further: okay, self, if you must eat more than the allotted 30 points a day, then at least *record* everything eaten. At least stay on track *that* much.

I imagine you can guess what comes next.

It’s been two weeks of my Angel making various bargains with my Devil. And the Devil laughing as she inhales candied nuts and dairy free egg nog.

I raised the white flag last night and decided to sit down and journal it out and see what’s going on. There are a lot of factors at play: my hormones are out of whack because I’m weaning my son, it’s THE HOLIDAYS and yummy comfort food is EVERYWHERE, being on a diet for 12 weeks is really hard and gets a little old after a while, I worked six days straight right as this downfall was starting (I work 12 hour urgent care shifts so this is no small thing. Honestly, working more than 3 in a row is pretty awful), and I’m pretty damned stressed since this is my first Christmas without my family. Also, my son with autism starts getting a little… shall we say, difficult this time of year because routines are getting out of whack with the holidays. Also, we’ve all been sick with colds (#UrgentCareLife).

But it isn’t just that I’ve been eating a bit more than I should or saying Yes to more cookies passed my way than I’d planned. I’ve returned to an old pattern of eating I’ve had since I was ten. (See this entry for more on that). So, I journaled away.

It’s this feeling that I have this hunger in me that will never be filled. Like I could consume the whole universe and I would still not be satisfied. It would still not be enough. I try and try to fill it. It’s exhausting. It’s a big black hole that won’t go away.

Because it is not something that can be filled with food. It’s trite but it’s true.

It is a hunger so wide and so deep. An ocean. No land in sight. And I am alone on a little boat. You can scream all you want but no one will hear.

It is something that must be filled with love and joy and speaking your truth and having someone hear and knowing you’re resilient and having faith it’s going to be okay. all of it. Filled with my son’s drawings and my daughter’s songs and my other son finally learning addition and my baby saying Uh oh! Filled with God and his saints and Hebrew prayers and oplatka and incense and chanting. Filled with the rhythm of the year and laughing when you really want to cry and doing what’s right even when it’s hard. Because life brings pain but we decide how much we suffer. And joy is a choice.

I am blessed with four beautiful children. I am blessed to be a physician. I am blessed to have been called to Catholicism. I am blessed to live in a warm home and drive a safe car and to be able to buy my children the things they need and some of the things they want. I am blessed to have grit. I am blessed because I am not alone. And it is not an endless ocean. Just puddles we’re jumping through. And in between, we laugh.

 

pretending to grill in the garden of eden

04 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in love, PTSD, Rape, Uncategorized

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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.

That choice is gone (or, This is hell. get walking)

06 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in christianity, Evil, kids, love, residency, Sin

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Mental illness kills.

It kills with heroin overdoses and self-inflicted gunshot wounds and anorexia induced cardiomyopathy and obesity induced sleep apnea and girls who take risks they shouldn’t with dangerous boys.

And when it does, there are usually kids left behind. And that is the worst tragedy.

When I was a resident, we would admit patients overnight who had failed at killing themselves with drugs. We needed to make sure they were medically stable before being sent to inpatient psych. The ER  had saved them but we were the ones to run fluids and monitor them and fill out the paperwork once the psychiatric hospital was ready for them.

It was the job of the residents to go see these patients at two in the morning and complete an H&P, a history and physical exam. We would ask the questions we asked all patients: chief complaint, onset, duration, intensity, chronology, exacerbating and remitting factors, associated symptoms. In this case, the chief complaint was not shortness of breath or fever. In this case, the chief complaint was, I wanted to die. So I tried.

Sometimes onset was a long time ago, often it was right beforehand. Intensity was of course always a ten. Sometimes they told you their story freely. Sometimes only the bare minimum. (we would write “history limited by non-cooperative historian)

I remember one patient in particular. She was a mom. She had three kids around the same ages as my three kids at the time.  She told her story of how her boyfriend had hurt her. Hurt her so badly she decided to die. I asked where her kids were when she took the pills. They were home with her. Maybe they’re the ones who found her and called 911. Maybe it was the worst night of their lives after many other bad nights. She didn’t know whether they’d found her or not. She didn’t care. She never asked us where her children were now. Just went on about the boyfriend and how he’d hurt her and how hurt she was. And I tried very hard to have compassion for my patient, but all I could think of was her kids. Of how badly a successful suicide by their mother would have wounded them.

I have never been the type to lack compassion for those so hurt inside they feel killing themselves is the best solution. I have heard good Christians say they will go to hell. I have heard people call them selfish for hurting their families and thought, do you have no grasp of how much pain they must be in?

But by this time, at the age of 34, I’d lived a bit more of life and had a more nuanced view, you could say. I still think its’s awful to say they’d go to hell. But I do not think, when children are involved, we can simply say they were ill, they were in pain, and so it was.

When I was 28, I had a boyfriend too, just like my patient. He broke my heart too, just like my patient. And I decided to die too, just like my patient. I planned out which pills I would take and when. I’d just had pharmacology before Christmas break had begun and knew which ones would be most effective. It was Christmas. The tree was up. I hadn’t given my kids their presents yet. We were alone in Erie for break. I decided I would drop them off with their dad. He would take them to his parents house for several days for New Years as he did each year. No one was expecting to hear from me. It was time to die.

I was in a depression as deep as any I’d been in many times before. But this time was different. I was 28. I’d been battling depression since I was ten. I always held out hope I would get better one day. Life held so much possibility. But at 28, I thought, here I am again. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t. I sat on my floor crying as my three year old and two year old asked what was wrong and brought me Children’s Tylenol to try to make me better. I hate that I did that to them. I am sorry that I did that to them.

I kept pulling presents from the basement and giving them to them one by one to keep them occupied. I fed them leftovers from the Christmas eve party at my family’s house I’d brought back. I suppose I changed their diapers. I don’t remember.

I planned out how to die and thought, they will go live with my parents and be so much better off without a worthless mother like me. But then it happened.

I entered into rational thought long enough to realize they wouldn’t go live with my parents if I died. They would go live with their dad. And their dad, luckily, was a tremendous asshole at that time. And I thought, I’m really worthless, but he’s even worse. Thank you God he was such an asshole. I couldn’t do that to them.

I remembered when my oldest son Soldier Boy was a baby and I didn’t know if he would live because of a genetic disorder they thought he might have. I remembered sitting in the glider in the nursery wailing a gutteral wail from as deep down as a person can, begging God not to take my baby. Put me through the pains of childbirth for all eternity, I said (I’d just finished a 32 hour natural birth so that’s no small statement). Put me through hell, I said. Just save my beautiful baby.

And he did.

And I thought to myself, I am in so much pain. It hurts so much to live. I am in hell. But now it seems I must do what I told God I would. I must walk through hell for my babies. And so I did. One step at a time.

When you are that depressed, finding the will and the energy just to get out of bed in the morning is excruciating and exhausting. But I did. I got out of bed and I took care of my babies. I went to class and studied. I called a psychiatrist’s office and was told they don’t take Medicaid. That about did me in. But I made myself call another. And I got a psychiatrist appointment for a month from then and a therapy appointment in a few weeks.

I kept breathing. I kept living. Every breath hurt. My heart ached. My muscles ached. My soul was not in my eyes if you bothered to look. Luckily no one looked.

I wanted to check myself into inpatient psych but I knew if I did it could ruin my career and I could get my kids taken from me. I was right. I’m glad I didn’t. But it hurt. It hurt so damn much.

It was in this time, this darkness, this exile, waiting to see a psychiatrist that I entered into the relationship with the man who was my trauma, who was my Ordeal. I was in hell, so I laid with a demon. I suppose.

There in the midst of my Ordeal, I made my way through hell. I chose to live each and every day in every decision I made. When I did not feel like getting out of bed,  I would say to myself, you either live or die. If you stay in bed, you are choosing to die. When I didn’t want to go for a walk to get exercise and fresh air, I would say to myself, you have two choices, life or death. If you do not go on this walk, you are choosing to die. And that is not an option. Your babies need you to live. This is hell. Get walking.

I do not know how it is that a part of me found wellness inside the trauma, the Ordeal. Sometimes I think it’s that a part of me, a version of me, broke off and endured the trauma while the rest of me went on with life as usual. Sometimes I think it was the adrenaline. Sometimes I think it was God. Maybe a little of each.

I know that with my therapist and my psychiatrist I got to a point where I could do a load of laundry without exhausting myself. Where I could study and enjoy neuroanatomy and feel proud of myself for rocking the exam. Where I could play with my kids.

Then came PTSD, but that’s another story for another time.

And so this is what flashed through my mind and heart when I stood there collecting this patient’s onset and chronology. For her chief complaint of choosing to die. This is why I could not lend her more compassion.

When we choose to have children, certain choices go away. Dying is one of them. Even when living is hell.

And to not die is not enough. We must choose to live every day in every choice we make. We must fight for our children. Even when we can’t bring ourselves to fight for us.

They are innocent. We are not. The body is weak, but the will is strong. Must be. For them. This body, this mind, this pain, is not endless. It will all fall away. Ending it a little sooner is not worth the price of their innocence.

It is not a choice. That choice is gone.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

And as I typed the words, I came to believe them

04 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by in christianity, empathy

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I got triggered the other day for the first time in a little while. I refer here to my PTSD. Something happened at work and I had a flashback to what had happened to me in medical school. When one of my fellow students did unspeakable things. And when those higher ups punished me for it instead of helping me. I have never had this happen at work before but there I was. My heart rate was picking up, my throat beginning to gag, the tears welling up. I quietly slipped away from the lecture. I wanted to call my husband but I knew if I spoke, I would begin to cry and wouldn’t be able to stop. So, I texted him instead:

I had a flashback and had to leave. Feeling sad. Please pray.

He couldn’t read the text right away, busy with taking care of baby Princess and our castle. So, I decided to pray with him anyway. I texted him:

God is good. God is good. I knew He is. Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ on my left, Christ on my right. Christ in the ear of all who hear me, Christ in the tongue of all who speak of me, Christ in the eye of all who see me. We pray for (the Violent Man)’s soul, for (the unethical Higher Up)’s soul. Poor banished children of Eve. May God have mercy on their souls.

And as I typed the words, I came to believe them. And I became calm.

I cannot say I never get angry with the Violent Man or the unethical Higher Up, but I have forgiven them as much as I can as of now. I pray for them and when I do, I forgive them more and more. I forgive because that’s what God tells us to do. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us. God has forgiven me, poor wretched sinner that I am. But it’s also true that forgiving them makes me feel better. Brings healing. Loosens the hold it all has over me.

Life is not static. It is not clean. I have my days of mourning and my days of joy. But I have come out of the whole thing better than might be expected. I have forgiven, I have trusted. Because I have to, really. We’re not owed anything in this life. It’s all a gift. There will be trauma. There will be pain. But there is so much more.

My husband got my text soon after I’d sent it. I texted him I was calmed down but asked that he still pray for me. He replied simply:

Yes Love…

My husband loves me. My babies too. God loves me perfectly. Jesus said that it’s easy to love your friends, but that we’re called to love our enemies as well. I used to think that was for the benefit of the enemies, or maybe just a way to keep us all in line. But I think it’s more than that. God really does love all of us more than we can comprehend, yes even child molesting sociopaths. So, yes, it is for our enemy’s sake he tells us to love one another. But he also knows that in striving to love our enemies, we grow closer to him, closer to being good, closer to all that is good. And so in trauma we find God, we find goodness. Our dark days are a gift as much as our joyful. He really does bring beauty from ashes.