Little Victories

So yesterday I was explaining to a mental health professional how I came to be in her office--that is, about the accident and its aftermath. She said, "So when you broke your elbows, you weren't engaged in risk-taking or dangerous behavior. You were doing something perfectly safe and ordinary. Do you think that has something to do with your anxiety and fear of making decisions?"

. . .

Huh.

In pursuit of doing something about the emotional issues left behind by the Stuff I Haven't Managed to Finish Describing Here (I know, I know), I went to the local behavioral health services and signed up for treatment. Counselling. Whatever seemed helpful. I was assigned a case manager, but didn't really know what to do with one of those, and hadn't met her before this week, when I got a call from the clinic office.

My case manager was no longer there. For the time being, my case would be handled by the slow-talking, kind of disorganized-seeming woman I was now talking to on the phone. Let's say her name's Ann, though it's not.

Since I still wasn't entirely sure what a case manager did, I didn't think much more about it. I was scheduled for an appointment this morning with the psychiatrist who'd done my evaluation last month, for a followup. Smart woman; I looked forward to it.

But her office called yesterday. She'd been transferred; I'd be seeing another doctor for my followup. (Those of you who are thinking this may not be the best way to treat an anxiety problem are probably onto something.) The new doctor was fine, but not as oriented toward being a therapist as the previous one was. Her job was to assess the effect of the medication I'd been prescribed, refill, change, or remove it if necessary. She asked what other treatment I was pursuing, and I explained that I'd sort of fallen through the cracks so far, but that I thought I'd be directed toward group therapy by my case manager. As we left her office, she suggested I ask if my case manager was in right then, to talk about individual therapy, rather than a group.

The receptionist called Ann, and said yes, she was in, and would see me right away. So I went out into the atrium, and found Ann coming to meet me.

She had some kind of disability--her walk was uneven, her eyes didn't track quite right, and her face had the asymmetry that comes from some facial muscle or nerve problem. She'd left her office keys on her desk, and had to knock to be let into the office area. She still spoke slowly, as if her sentences were being rationed.

I told her what the doctor had suggested. She told me that, in the system, clients had to attend group therapy for a month, to prove they were commited to the process, before they could be assigned to individual therapy. But that was okay, Ann said. She'd get me into a group, and I could meet individually with her in her office afterward.

It was like being asked to the prom by a guy I wasn't interested in. All I could think was, this is a bad fit, this is a waste of her time and mine. This is not the person who can get me to dig down to the root of my fear of decisions, work, conflict, mistakes, failure, mortality.

Then Ann told me that in 1969, when she was twelve, she'd been diagnosed with a brain tumor, a big one, deep in the tissues in the brain stem area. Her doctors told her family she would never speak well, if at all, never be able to walk, would probably die. She died on the table a couple of times during surgery.

In my lap was a copy of Norman Doidge's The Brain That Changes Itself, a survey of discoveries about neuroplasticity. It was the book I'd brought to read in the waiting room. I'd wondered as I read if I would have had the determination and courage the patients in those cases had, to come back from something that should have been a life sentence. I doubted I could be that kind of person.

The kind of person sitting in the chair in front of me offering to help me.

Ann believed that, when she died during surgery, she saw and spoke to God. He offered to answer seven questions for her, any seven. One of them, she told me, was, "Do you really send people to hell forever?" Ann's god told her he never sent anyone to hell. Nothing he'd made deserved that. God forgave everybody. But some people couldn't forgive themselves; they created their own hell and lived in it.

I made a judgment about Ann based on the way she looked, and moved, and talked. It was wrong. Did she make a judgment about me? Did she see me and think, "There's nothing wrong with her. She has everything, all the advantages. She doesn't need my time and experience"? Maybe she did. If so, she overcame hers faster than I did mine.

I will try very hard to live up to my new case manager's faith in me. I will probably make stupid snap judgments about people again, but when I do, maybe I'll notice and second-guess them.

And I'll work on learning to forgive myself.

Let's see--when we left our protagonist, she was in a hospital bed watching things blow up and fall down on TV.

A last, I hope, note on that: Watching the Towers go down was bad. Watching the Towers go down over and over and not being able to leave the room or even move to a chair that didn't have a view of the television was, frankly, hell. I think I did finally talk someone into either turning off the TV or pulling the curtain around my bed. But I still can't watch that footage.

( Click here for more of the story. )

Will reminded me, in the comments on the last post, of a part of the story I'd left out.

Back to the Renaissance Festival, just after the accident. Someone found Safety Services to take me to First Aid. Two Safety Services guys arrived with a RennFest ambulance: a two-wheeled wooden cart designed to be pulled by one person and pushed from behind by another. (Usually patrons hired one of these carts to haul them around the site, but I think Safety Services had the option to comandeer one if they needed it.)

After hearing an account of what happened and what appeared to be wrong with me, the guys poured me onto the bench seat (I might have been a little inclined to pass out) and set off across the site to the First Aid building.

And as they went, they cleared pedestrians out of our path by shouting, "Make way! Make way for the new owner of the Festival!"

Laughing didn't hurt at all. I still love those two guys, whoever they are.

Two months ago, a friend came to visit. She couldn't stay more than a couple days, so we did what one does in these cases: talked almost nonstop every waking hour, trying to catch up.

One of those conversations was in the kitchen. She sat at the little desk where the phone is, and I stood leaning against the counter, probably paused in the middle of doing something kitchen-y. I don't remember how the segue went, how she led into the question. But she asked for the story of how I broke my elbows.

Her son and daughter-in-law had been sort of intimately involved in the immediate aftermath of the elbow-breaking incident. They took care of me, put me up, solved a thousand emergency problems. But my friend had the story only secondhand, and wanted to hear some of the details, since she knew pretty much everyone involved. So I began to tell her.

As I did, I stiffened up. My voice was flat and harsh. I clutched the edge of the counter behind me as if the floor might disappear and only that counter would keep me from the drop. My stomach threatened me with dire things.

Everything I told my friend happened six years ago. Old news. All over now.

Until I think about it, or try to talk about it, or see or hear things that remind me of it. Then I get to be a time traveler. I get to revisit the last quarter of 2001, when I slipped and the wheels came off my life.
( More on the other side of the cut. )

If you're here, it's because you decided you wanted to read about how I got kind of, um, broken, and what I'm finally trying to do about it. If you didn't decide any such thing, there's probably a typo in that search string, dear.

Journaling is, they tell me, a recognized therapeutic technique. LiveJournaling, complete with animated userpics and mood icons, could be the way to go for us pixel-stained technopeasant wretches in therapy.

Heh. I'm in therapy. Well, that's a start.