Tag Archives: rape

13 years

03 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by in autism, doctors, kids, love, medicine, PTSD, Rape, special needs, Uncategorized

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I am sitting here reading immunology. Cytokine storm, interleukin-1, natural killer cells. I am doing the thing I have been doing for almost 13 years now. I am trying to fix my babies.

Autism and PANS and Lyme and on and on. Their immune systems have betrayed them. They are attacking their own brains. I must stop the marauding hordes. I must. I’m their mother, after all.

I decided to become a doctor almost 13 years ago. Soldier Boy was a few months old. He’d already had more medical tests and seen more specialists than most of us will see our whole lives. Diagnosis after diagnosis. The idiot doctors couldn’t see he was perfect.

He was perfect. He is perfect. But, he’s not. His body betrays him.

I decided to become a doctor for a lot of reasons. Some noble and some not so much. One of the reasons I became a doctor was because I wanted to fix my son. I wanted to save my perfect baby from the many sicknesses he’d been born with.

I had his little brother while I was studying to apply to medical school. He was different. He was not sick. No tests, no specialists. He never even got a cold or had a fever. Ever.

Then, when he was 3 1/2 he stopped eating and began threatening to kill us and… you can read about it here. He got PANS.

Doctors have been no help. I am now finally a doctor all these years later. Almost 13. And now it is my job to figure things out, to help them, to fix them, to save them.

And so I am sitting up, exhausted, reading through immunology slides trying to understand the autoimmune nature of autism. Trying to understand the things I can do for Lyme triggered PANS that has been going on for eight years.

Innate immune system, cellular immunity, microglial activation, …

As I sit looking at the diagrams of these various immune processes, they are familiar to me. You learn so much in medical school they say it’s like drinking from a fire hydrant. You retain the things you use in whatever specialty you wind up in. But I am finding now the things you haven’t thought of in 10 years come back quickly when you need them.

Ten years ago I sat studying Immunology in my living room in Erie. Its a very clear memory. Sitting in the large overstuffed brown arm chair next to the end table with the touch lamp. The same end table I’d placed our Little People manger scene on at Christmas time. We lost baby Jesus and I replaced him with a Matchbox car because… because little boys. The chair was in front of the big bay window where my boys would climb up excitedly when the garbage truck came by.

I remember so clearly sitting there reading my Immunology book the night before the exam. I was behind on studying and I was excited it was clicking. I think I will do well on this test, I thought.

I was behind on my studying because of The Ordeal. Because of Jeremy. I failed the exam the next day.

Amazingly, the unit after that, Neuroanatomy, I rocked. It was considered the hardest course of first year. I was being actively traumatized by a sociopathic sadist, and I somehow managed to kick some ass. I’d gone from scared to pissed off at that point. I’d decided I was going to find a way to turn him in no matter what. Once I got to that place in my head, focusing on studying wasn’t a problem. I’m very good at compartmentalizing my mind when it’s required

But Immunology, I failed. And so I had to remediate it that summer. Immunology and Pharmacology. He did too. I saw him there. It was in those two weeks of remediation that I turned him in. I passed the remediation exam. And then went and turned him in. I was busy.

For so many years this trauma has been at the center of the story I tell of myself. Not so much to other people but to myself. For years it made me believe I was worthless. And then I entered recovery and I became defined as a survivor. Each step closer to becoming an attending physician was marked with a “screw you Sylvia” (Sylvia being the head of my med school who slut shamed me and tried to kick me out) and a “you’re in jail, Jeremy but look at me”.

I had come to accept this. But now, it isn’t true anymore. It isn’t the biggest part of my story.

Being a doctor was always about my boys. And now it is again. They’re the reason I fought to stay in med school when Sylvia was trying to force me out, heaping degradation on me. They’re the reason I stayed up til 2 in the morning studying organic chem long before I ever met Jeremy Noyes. They’re the reason I have started my own practice now. The thing I have been dreaming of for almost 13 years.

In some respects, it is easier to have rape and torture at the center of your story than to have your sick babies there. What mother wouldn’t rather endure suffering herself than to see her babies suffer? But we are not put on Earth to choose the easy path.

I named this blog I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead when I was in residency working 90 hour weeks, 36 hour shifts. But the truth is, for doctors, the sleepless nights and exhaustion pretty much end when graduation day comes and attending life begins. For autism moms, there is no graduation. There is no finish line. We really will wait our whole lives for a sound sleep.

I went into medical school to become a different kind of doctor than the ones my son had. Condescending, close minded, clueless. I went undercover. Deep cover. And I unavoidably lost my way. Drank the Kool-Aid because there really is no other way to make it out alive.

But I’m on the other side now and I remember who I was. I am an autism mom who became a doctor. I am an autism mom. I am an autism mom who knows immunology and pharmacology and neuroanatomy. I am an autism mom who gave her soul and body and mind and heart for her medical degree. And I have it. And *that* is the story of me. Jeremy and Sylvia were mere diversions.

I am going to help my children and my patients. I am going to speak out and challenge all they do that is wrong. I am going to sleep very little. Because that’s what autism moms do.

Good night. I have some reading to do. 

happy valentine’s day

22 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by in kids, love, PTSD, Rape

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Those of us who’ve lived trauma have our anniversaries. There are no greeting cards or flowers as a general rule, but you never fail to remember it, year after year. There’s not a daft husband among us, covering his calendar in sticky notes to try not to forget to get his someone special that something special.

The peculiar thing about a trauma anniversary is that you share it with someone horrible. You’re the two people in the world who hold it an anniversary. Thinking of each other but hopefully not sending chocolates or poems. My 11 year old would say that doing so would be “cringy.”

Jeremy’s trial started the week of Valentine’s day 2011. The Ordeal with him began around the same time in 2008. So, it’s our special time of year. Me and Jeremy.

The thought had occurred to me a few months ago that the only two people in the world who think of my trauma everyday. Who will think of it everyday for the rest of our lives. The only two people are me and Jeremy.

I double checked with my husband on this one. He doesn’t think of it everyday. Probably most days but not everyday.

It took some getting used to, this idea that I will most likely continue to think of him and of It everyday for the rest of my life. Me at 87 still thinking of it everyday. Maybe I’m wrong. But that’s not likely.

It’s not that I think of him for very long. Something reminds me of It and the thought flits through my mind and it’s gone. It doesn’t linger. I don’t ruminate on it. It doesn’t ruin my day or activate my sympathetic nervous system. No fight or flight. No pupil dilation or rapid heartbeat or paresthesia. Not anymore.

Valentine’s Day this year for me was filled with sweets from my beloved and my four year old daughter squealing with joy over the Shopkins pens her Secret Admirer got her (hint: it’s me. I’m the Secret Admirer). The rad tech at work made a coconut cake. I got the joy of making my husband smile with the surprise I got him. I also looked up articles on the trial and re-read the chapter in my book on it, lost in the quotes of what was actually said on the stand. Remembering. I’m okay with that. I don’t find it cringy. Maybe you do. Eh.

PTSD is a result of fighting these things. It is allowing the cringiness of sharing Valentine’s Day with your trauma memories to keep you locked in it. How do we find a way to be so brave as to face a thousand little things like that? To let go of how we know things should be, of how we thought they would be.

It’s the same thing I went through with accepting my son’s special needs. It’s the same thing so many of us go through in so many ways throughout life. The only difference with trauma is that it’s a whole fucking lot harder. Terrifying actually.

I saw on the news today that Milo Yiannopoulos gave an interview saying pedophilia (that is, child rape) is okay as long as the kid is 13 or so. And now his career’s hit a slight blip. And I thought of Jeremy and his love of Foucault and his love of Ron Paul. Of Trump’s friend Jeffrey Epstein and the man who protected him and of Trump himself.

Jeremy wasn’t a freak. He was just a working class predator who got caught and couldn’t afford an expensive lawyer, whose parents didn’t have connections. Child predators are literaly running our damn country. And no one really cares.

I wish I could send a Valentine to all the little girls out there suffering under predators like Jeremy (and our President). I wish they could know how wonderfully made they are, how strong they are to go on surviving and how much I admire and love them for that. How wrong it is we leave them there because talking about the epidemic of child rape is cringy. I wish they were opening Shopkins pens and squealing instead of drifting off in their minds to another place as they are hurt.

I share my Valentine’s Day with them too. And it may not be okay, but it is what it is.

 

I have slept in the bed with evil

09 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by in autism, Evil, PTSD, Rape, Sin

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I am wearing all black today. I am in mourning. I am not going to make a joke about my goth days in high school. I am not going to compare the title of this post to that awful made-for-TV movie from the nineties starring Tori Spelling, “Mother May I Sleep with Danger.” This is no joke. This is not a nightmare we will wake up from tomorrow, a bipolar fugue we will not remember when it ends and we find ourselves far from home. It may be the 1930s.

I do not use the word evil lightly. A lot of people have referred to Hillary Clinton as evil in this election cycle. I am as big a critic of Bill Clinton’s policy and Hillary’s record on free trade, her foreign policy, and her “super predator” comments as anyone. But she’s hardly evil.

For four months, I slept in the bed of a man who can rightly be called evil. A man who loved raping and torturing little girls above all else, who admired Hitler, who raped me again and again and again and threatened to kill my children. A man who disturbed even the seasoned federal judge and the FBI agent who were involved in his case. He was a medical student on his way to becoming a doctor. Nobody suspected. None of us even knew such evil existed as it all came out, certainly not that our fellow medical student possessed the evil.

Trauma changes you. It changes your relationship with yourself, with your family and friends, with God, with the world itself and every person you encounter day by day. They say the fundamental experience of trauma is the feeling you have been abandoned. By the people you love, by the ones who were supposed to protect you, and by God himself.

My Ordeal changed me in so many ways but one of the worst was the knowledge of just what evil exists in our world. Evil I did not know existed. And I had not lived a sheltered life to that point. I was not naïve. And yet I was. My fear now is that we as a country are being naïve. Despite our very violent history.

We cannot underestimate the possibilities of this new world. We cannot afford to be naïve. I do not know what will happen but I know it could be very, very bad.

A few years ago we were at a festival at a place called City Island in Harrisburg. Our three sons went off on their own while my husband and Princess (still a baby) and I stayed and chatted with some friends. Eventually two of our sons came back, but not the third. Our legally blind, autistic son was not with them. They told us they’d had some kind of fight with him and decided to leave him. They were too young to know not to do this. Too naive.

My husband and I split up to cover the island looking for him. And as I looked in booths and the dense woods that framed the island, pushing Princess in the stroller, terror went through my body. My mind went to Jeremy. To the people he talked to on the internet who also loved raping and torturing children. Who sent him images of their horrific acts, recorded in stills and movies. The ones presented at trial that took any remaining innocence from anyone in that courtroom. I cried as I looked. I pictured what might happen to him. Things that are worse and more common than we allow ourselves to believe. I didn’t want to scare Princess, but I could not hold back the tears. My husband found him and I ran up to him, shaking and crying and finding it hard to bring the oxygen into my lungs.

I do not know how so many people at Penn State stood by while little boys were raped and did little or nothing. I will never comprehend that. The coaches, the janitor, Mike McQuery whatever the hell he was. I could have been killed. My children could have been killed. I laid down my body. I laid down my mind. I lost seven years of my life to PTSD. So did my children and husband, lost seven years of me being truly present in our lives. I have no regrets and never have. Not for a second. But I know the men of Penn State are much more common than people like me. And this election confirms it.

Evil can flourish, slowly, insidiously. I see friends who loved Bernie so much now so glad they voted Trump. I can see the mainstream Republicans now falling in line or being eliminated (we’re assured by Trump’s people the are making “a list” of “his enemies”). I can see the inevitable persecution of journalists and violent crackdown on peaceful protests. Hate crimes and sexual assault rates rising (if you don’t believe me, look at what happened in the aftermath of Brexit). Muslims forced to wear badges identifying them (yes, Trump said this).

You think I exaggerate. You think this couldn’t be the 1930s. And I hope you’re right. But I know in my bones you probably aren’t.

God bless and protect the Union.

 

Lemons and sugar in the snow

31 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in marriage, movies, my awesome husband, PTSD, Rape

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My husband and I are trying to get out and meet new people, to try to make some friends. “We’re putting ourselves out there,” I said to him as we discussed it the other night, “so to speak. It’s kind of like dating. We’re trying to find another couple to be besties with so we have to be more social and put some feelers out.” He looked a little annoyed, or maybe mildly disgusted. Sort of like the face you make when your stomach is slightly off and you’re trying to figure out if it’s going to pass or if it’s the beginning of a full on GI issue.

I took the first step for us (just as I did back when we first met) and found a get together for us with other 30-something couples with kids at a nearby pub. It’s other Catholic couples so I figured I could pique my hubs’ interest with it and I was right (this is, in fact, even more complicated than dating as it turns out. It’s like I’m a matchmaker *and* I’m dating. This analogy is getting a little cumbersome). I checked with our babysitter and she was free the night of the cas’ soiree so I entered it onto our family scheduling app and we were all set (It wasn’t actually that simple because nothing in our chaotic life is that simple, but we’ll leave it at that).

A few days later, we were driving home from our Saturday evening marital therapy appointment where we’d spent an hour making a family genogram (don’t ask), and my mind began to wander as my hubs drove the minivan down 376 as Soldier Boy made explosion noises behind me and the Baby tried to decide if he was going to cry or fall asleep. I started thinking about what I would wear when we went out to the pub in a couple weeks. I’ve been losing weight lately and I thought of the clothes I haven’t worn in a while that will now fit. I mentally assembled an outfit from med school and paired it with a pair of boots I recently bought. I pictured my hubs and I alone in my car (not the damn minivan, thank you very much) heading out and what nice compliment he might pay me. And then I thought of what I might say to him.

“Do you remember this outfit? Remember the last time I wore it?”

The answer is not our honeymoon or our first date or anything other such romantic thing. The answer is actually that I bought this outfit at the Millcreek Mall in February of 2011 while we were in Erie for the trial of Jeremy Noyes. The man who put me through my Ordeal.

I did not think of this moment, of telling him this, with sadness or anger. I actually thought of it with a slight small on my face.

Jeremy’s trial started on February 14th. It was my hubs Eric and my first Valentine’s Day as a couple. We spent the week up in cold snowy Erie. Jeremy had fired his attorney and chosen to represent himself. He subpoenaed me to testify. I’m not sure which is worse: having to be questioned by your rapist in federal court, or all the time before it that you spend imagining what it will be like. We spent the whole week in Erie, waiting for it to be my turn to testify. Eric was allowed to sit in on the trial but I was not since it could affect my testimony when I was called to the stand later on.

I only packed one suit but I thought I might need a second if my testimony took more than one day. So, as Eric sat taking in images and words at that trial no person would ever want to, evil hard to imagine, I went to the mall. I bought more than I needed, more than I should have. I bought a really, really pretty top. A flowy translucent top with corals and browns and turquoisie blues in a muted floral design like the impressionists, Manet and Monet and all that. It was so pretty. The trial was so ugly. So I bought it even though I was broke. I’m not sorry I did.

We stayed at a nice hotel that the government said they would reimburse us for. We went down to the nice restaurant in the nice hotel one night. I don’t remember which night. The night before I testified? The night after? The night in between? (I was right, it was two days of testimony so I really *did* need that second suit. Not everything else, but, the suit yes)

I don’t remember which night it was but I remember getting ready to go downstairs and making him laugh. I remember sitting there in that nice restaurant in that nice hotel in that pretty flowy top eating a lovely meal with my lovely fiancé. I remember he ordered us dessert and we shared it with two forks and it tasted better than I thought food could. I remember laughing. I remember his eyes. His mouth when the corners turned up. We were still there. In Erie. At a horrible stomach turning trial of a sociopath child predator. We were still there, but for a night, it was a little less. A little less there. There, but better.

And so, almost six years later, when I sat in the mocha colored minivan, a wedding and two kids and a hell of a lot else later, I thought of wearing that top again with the corners of my mouth turned up. It didn’t make me think of my trauma or sitting in that courtroom as Jeremy said the worst things imaginable to me. It made me think of that night. Of that respite, of the soft lighting and the attentive waiter and the clean linen table cloth on the little round table we sat at together. It made me think of all the years and all the hell he’s stood by me through. Of this most unusual life we’ve had together. Of the sweetness that comes with the bitters.

We had watched a documentary about a Holocaust survivor the night before. Made by a man Eric had made films with in another life. And the survivor in the movie told a story of starvation, of being moved from camp to camp. And on one train ride they all looked so malnourished these village women threw food onto the train, whatever they had with them from the market. And so, they had things like flour and sugar and lemons. And at one stop, a man got snow off the ground and brought it on and they made lemon ice with the lemons and sugar. The survivor in the movie said how much he loved lemon ice for the rest of his life. How could that be, I’d asked my husband. Eric had made a lot of films with survivors and he said, yes, he’d heard that many times before. He said, the lemon ice was the first thing he’d eaten after starving for so long, why wouldn’t he love it now? I said, “I guess if I was more like him I could take fish oil capsules.” But I can’t.

Jeremy made me take fish oil capsules. I can’t take them now. I can’t even take vitamins. The body remembers. The esophagus remembers. Remembers the other things he forced down my throat, remembers not breathing, not knowing if he would ever let me breathe again. Eric says I should try to overcome my aversion to fish oil and I say, No. I have overcome a fuck of a lot in the past eight years. I’m just gonna take fish oil as a loss. I’m gonna pass on conquering that one.

But sitting in that mocha minivan, I see the fish oil capsules are not my lemon ice. The flowy top is my lemon ice. I see now how he could love lemon ice. The joy and the beauty and the bodily memory of quite a different kind.

Life is not simple. Is not, yes or no. Good or evil. Would that Eric and I hadn’t spent our first Valentine’s Day together in gray snowy Erie at the trial of a madman. But there was beauty there too. There were lemons and sugar in that snow too. There too.

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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97b4387e5e4c8cb774f98aee73ea273d

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

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

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

Go For It

15 Monday Feb 2016

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

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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.

You will sleep soundly because we don’t

15 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by in doctors, Evil, Rape, Sin

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“Professor Evans of the Presbyterian College, Carmarthen, actually saw a sin-eater about the year 1825, who was then living near Llanwenog, Cardiganshire. Abhorred by the superstitious villagers as a thing unclean, the sin-eater cut himself off from all social intercourse with his fellow creatures by reason of the life he had chosen; he lived as a rule in a remote place by himself, and those who chanced to meet him avoided him as they would a leper. This unfortunate was held to be the associate of evil spirits, and given to witchcraft, incantations and unholy practices; only when a death took place did they seek him out, and when his purpose was accomplished they burned the wooden bowl and platter from which he had eaten the food handed across, or placed on the corpse for his consumption.”

I gave a talk on PTSD in women to a room full of doctors today. I talked about incest and oral rape to a room full of doctors today. I started off my talk by telling them the next 45 minutes were going to be unpleasant and uncomfortable because discussing trauma, thinking about trauma, is an innately unpleasant, uncomfortable thing. And for the first five minutes or so they did look uncomfortable. Which made sense. And then they didn’t. They stopped looking uncomfortable and began to look the way they always do during a lecture. Some of them listened attentively and made eye contact. Some of them dozed off.

It went pretty much as lectures do. There were questions and comments afterward. About screening and medication and epidemiology.

I told them something else before the lecture started too. I told them I have PTSD and that I was talking to them about PTSD that day (not hypertension or diabetes or depression or all the hundred other diseases it would have been so easy to talk about) because I wanted to help all the survivors I’ve met along the way.

I have not told many doctors over the years that I have PTSD because the admission of the disease, quite unlike other diseases, is a confession of having lived something. In this case, something horrible and terrifying and evil. I’m not supposed to tell them what happened to me in medical school. Everyone who knows tells me so. We are a society that blames the victim and the medical world is no different. But these people who tell me this, these well meaning people who want to protect me, they don’t know how awful a thing it is to not tell.

What good is it to gain the whole world for the price of your soul? And a medical career, after all, is hardly the whole world.

The thing that keeps me from telling them what happened to me is not fear. I left fear behind the day I turned him in knowing he very well might kill my children, knowing very well bad men like him rarely go to jail for very long. The reason I don’t tell them is that they wouldn’t care, not enough anyway. They do not know evil as those of us who’ve lived it do. They do not have the darkness in them. When evil surfaces, we listen for a moment and tell her we feel so bad for her and tell her she’s so brave. And then we forget. Because anyone who can, will. And the reason we can is because of the sin eaters.

We swallow down the darkness for the rest of the world. It sits in us, contained in us, and you are safe.

It will never change. It is not patriarchy or capitalism or imperialism. It is evil, it is fallen Man.

I stood up there and I taught those doctors about the three stages of recovery from PTSD. I made them feel so good about the whole thing. These women will always have this chronic disease, they’ll never get justice for what happened to them, but they’ll be okay because they’ll break their silence and push through their fear and integrate the trauma experience into the story of their lives. They’ll be redeemed by learning acceptance. Not resignation, acceptance. Cue the music, fade out as the heroine smiles through her tears and heads out to conquer the world with her loving supportive man at her side.

I swallowed down the darkness for them. And there it sits.

I write this now not for those of you who will read this who do not know the darkness. You will never change. You can’t. You will forget this in a few minutes or a day. I write this for the sin eaters. So I might feel a little less alone for a moment before I head back to work, to the land of the those we protect who will never really know.

Only Ivy Leaguers Get Raped Apparently

27 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in doctors, empathy, medicine, outrage, residency

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I was once raped by an educated man. He knew a lot about sociology, philosophy, and medicine. He was also a misogynist who harbored a secret internal hatred for women which he hid very well from all those around him. It wasn’t any more or less traumatic because he was so educated. It wasn’t any more or less shocking to me because we were both studying to be doctors at the time. It was what all trauma is: Brutal and Terrifying and Life changing. When you know you’re in a position so powerless that you might be killed, education and institutional prestige are of little concern. But in the days and months and years that follow, you cannot be truly healed until you find your voice and tell your story in whatever form it is that your story needs to be told. When our society priveleges the stories of certain survivors over others (what of men, prisoners, spousal rape survivors?) it keeps us from healing as quickly as we should. I am glad the voices of certain surivors from Ivy League schools are being heard to the extent they are (I don’t delude myself into thinking things are great for them), but we cannot ignore the voices of so many others. We have a story to tell too.

There’s been a lot of media coverage of the campus rape epidemic lately. Which is a good thing. There’s been an outcry against George Will’s op-ed piece questioning the validity of a lot of these rapes and talking about the privileges attached to being a rape survivor. Also a good thing. But if you read the majority of these articles, you’d think rape and a lack of appropriate administrative response by universities only occurred at elite schools. It wasn’t until I was about a dozen articles in that I even knew a medical school, WVSOM ( West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine), was one of the 55 schools under federal investigation for failing to handle reported rapes appropriately. The only reason it got a mention in the article was the fact it was a lesser known school and I got the impression that the point the writer was making was that it’s a lot more shocking that rape victims get treated badly at an Ivy League school than at one of those lesser known schools.

What’s the logic there? Do people in the Ivy League have higher moral standards than us commoners ? Is the upper class known for its devotion to women’s rights? More importantly, regardless of how surprised you are with the Ivy League’s mistreatment of sexual assualt victims (as opposed to those low brow schools where you just expect people to get raped and then harassed by the administration apparently), does that mean that the voices of the men and women at the other 45 schools don’t deserve to be heard as well? Is it any less an outrage when it happens to someone at a lowly osteopathic med school? It’s a lot of questions and I’m sure you can tell how I would answer them, but I’d really like to hear how these journalists would answer them. I know no one is truly unbiased, but can’t they at least pretend, make some kind of effort to appear to give a damn about the rest of us?

When I mentioned the news about WVSOM to some of my fellow residents, they were genuinely shocked. Not only could they not believe a medical school would treat a student who’d been raped poorly, they honest-to-goodness couldn’t fathom the idea that medical students would rape one another. They really just couldn’t comprehend the idea of one of our kind being a sexual predator. Am I the only one bothered that our culture is promoting these kinds of ideas?

It is shocking someone from the Ivy League would rape. It is shocking someone studying to become a doctor would rape. Okay, then who is it that we expect to rape? Apparently we expect uneducated people to rape. I guess the idea is that education is a humanzing process? But rape is, in essence, a very human act. One of the most human acts really. Rape is about anger and the need to control, something every level of society has demonstrated since civilization began. Is it really so difficult to think that Ivy League men, so used to privelege and control, might not have a need to control Ivy League women too? Do medical school admission commitees really get a feel for how angry an applicant is? Unless they’ve been convicted of a felony or misdemeanor, probably not. (And if you’ve ever been in an OR with an instrument-hurling surgeon, you might question if anger in and of itself is a generally discouraged trait in the world of medicine)

I don’t suppose we’ll ever be as upset with the death of innocent civilians overseas as we will be with the death of innocent civilians in America. Maybe we’ll always mourn more for caucasian, suburban school children shot than we do for african-american inner-city kids killed likewise. But, I hope for better days. And I work for better days. My name is Elizabeth Spaar and I was raped in medical school. Yes, our kind do indeed do that kind of thing. Of course, it was an osteopathic school, so maybe you’re unimpressed.