Throw down your anchor

I have been under the care of a psychiatrist for 30 years. I am teetering somewhere between my eighth and ninth doctor currently. These may not seem like bad odds but when you do the math, this is a lot of changes over a lot of years. 

I have a few favorite doctors and up until the age of 40 I always felt well-cared for: someone had my back, someone was watching out for my mental health, someone cared.

When Dr. H.A. retired I had been seeing him for eight years and his retirement was difficult. He was a doctor that not only cared for my mental health, but checked to make sure I was getting the care I needed overall, because he seemed to understand that when the rest of my body was in good health, then good mental health was easier to maintain.

When I began seeing my new psychiatrist , I just assumed that he would care for me as well as Dr. H.A. The shock to my system was like crashing into an embankment in the night. I struggled to understand why, instead of telling me when he wanted to see me next, he asked me when I wanted to come back. When I shared struggles with him he would make suggestions of medication changes, but mostly left the decision up to me.

These changes, were, at first confusing. He was the doctor and I was the patient; why was he not telling me what to do and instead asking me what should be done? After five years, he left his practice and then came Dr. B.

At first Dr. B seemed fine, but before long I felt he was similar to Dr. V and mostly kept asking when I wanted to return and what I wanted to do.  I was critical and outspoken about the care I was receiving and know, at this point, that my anger seemed to grow over the disbelief that this is the way the system now works.

As we packed up our house to move to another area I knew I would have to find a new psychiatrist. By this time, I had learned, repeatedly, that psychiatric care in the United States had changed and that no longer could a person be expected to see a psychiatrist because they were depressed, but that if you did have the benefit of being under one’s care, this doctor was going to spend as little time as possible with you and leave any and all counseling, and/or emotional consultation, up to a counselor.

How silly of me not to realize this years ago. Of course if you are depressed it is only a chemical issue and why would a psychiatrist need to know if you are under stress or throwing breakable items at a stone wall or cutting your skin or not sleeping or not eating? Am I the only one who struggles to understand that if a psychiatrist does not understand your emotional state or how you are living from one day to the next, he or she cannot possibly prescribe the correct psychiatric medications or dosage to help you?

“This is just the way things are now, get used to it,” I have been told. 

What if you had tried a dozen different diets over 20 years and still couldn’t lose weight, scheduled an appointment with your doctor for help and he said, have you tried counting calories? What if he asked you this without giving you any opportunity to explain what you had already tried and then went on to explain that if you take in more calories than you burn you are going to get fat?

This is what happened at my most recent psychiatric appointment with a doctor to whom I had been referred with accolades. The first thing he wanted to know is if I had side effects from my medications and then went on to explain to me how these medications, antidepressants referred to as MAO inhibitors, worked. I felt my body go into flight or fight mode and stopped him mid-sentence while he continued on with his pages-long, first-year-of-med-school speech to me.

I told him I have been on these medications for 20 years and know how they work; I am not stupid. He went on without pause, discussing things that can happen when you take MAO inhibitors. 

This time my mind went numb and flight or fight would have been preferable to the utter sense of desperation I felt in that moment.

When he asked me about sleep and wondered why I get up during the night, I couldn’t remove the edge from my voice when I told him I never said I get up, just that I wake up. He continued talking until I told him that I was having problems sleeping but not anymore.

He never asked me why I was there and when I could see he was not going to address the real problem I just began telling him what it was. He then asked me if I had additional symptoms. When I told him the stress I had been under, he said, “I meant physical issues.”

Mid-sentence the female assistant sitting in the room on my right hand side said, “Dr. S, you are over time.” This was after 20 minutes. My new psychiatrist spent 20 minutes with me. 

In the movie As Good as it Gets, Jack Nicholson’s character says it best when he says: “I’m very intelligent here, if you’re going to give me hope you’re going to have to do better than you’re doing. I’m drowning here and you’re showing me the water.”

 In the same sentence, I have heard people describe the great suicide prevention initiatives moving into place, while also discussing the crisis in finding psychiatric care. Miss Clavel in the children’s book Madeline had a knack for sensing when something was not right. She would look around and with her Parisian accent, declare, “Something is not right.” I don’t think Miss Clavel’s intuition is needed to see that with the current state of psychiatric care in the United States we are headed for a tsunami. 

 In the midst of mental health professionals, I have been criticized when I don’t instill hope with my words or suggest answers to the crises I bring forth. Sorry about that. If you are someone who needs psychiatric care, throw down your anchor, demand your care, and find a life raft in the midst of ocean liners, or learn to swim, fast, uphill, in the pouring rain.

One Week in the Woods

We have been living in our new home for one week. The second day I was here my sister was packing up her things to leave after she and her daughter drove over to help unpack. When she walked back to the house before leaving I thought she had forgotten something. Instead she had become worried about leaving me standing in my cardboard-strewn home, in the middle of the woods, alone. We cried as she left and I listened to her car drive away up our dirt and gravel driveway until she turned onto the highway.

The next day I was momentarily overcome by joy as I stepped out our garage door with my 10-month-old German shepherd, Zoey, and was in the woods immediately. The beauty here with a softly-flowing, bubbling stream, surrounded by evergreens and moss and spring wildflowers, is a creation of God’s I quickly became lost within. Yesterday Zoey even stumbled upon two shed deer antlers and I gleefully said to her, “Look what we found!”

When we return home an hour or so later, Zoey hops up into her new dog bath and already seems resigned to a daily scrub down if she is to have her fun running back and forth through the water, the woods, the mud and the moss. Like all my shepherds before her, she stays right by my side most of the time. She loves to run as fast as she can across the forest floor, adept at avoiding tree limbs and gnarled roots. With a whistle, she runs right back to check on me before circling around the trees that reach skyward, sniffing out animals that passed through earlier and picking up sticks and dropping them as she becomes quickly distracted by a fluttering leave.

Unfortunately, even here in the woods, fear and anger do not leave me for long. In a brand new home there are dozens of brand new gadgets. I have quickly become frustrated at finding the TV shows that I like to watch. There are too many buttons and arrows. It has only been a year since I became partially skilled at handling the TV in our last home, and then only because my husband moved away and my last son left for college. How easy it had become to let others do for me until no one else was around.

When my son Eric does offer to show me how to use something, like our induction stovetop or the convection feature on the full-sized double ovens, I tell him I am too distracted, busy, frazzled and fried to learn. When pressed, I relent, only to discover that I don’t need to be an engineer or teenager to learn the controls, this time.

Sometimes it is funny when my husband and I lose yet one more item in our home because it was shoved at the last minute in a random box or put away in a drawer we have forgotten exists. Most of the time, though, it causes me to obsess with anger and single-mindedness until I either locate the item or give up in tears in the corner of the basement.

Today is the first day I have not unpacked, put away, sorted or sifted. Instead, I went “into town” to get some groceries. When I was ready to check out the woman behind the register asked me if I had found everything I needed. I told her I would be happy to list all of the items I couldn’t find if only she would be able to do something about it.

Here in the woods, one day by one day, I aim to work to be happy enough even if I don’t find everything I need and even if there is nothing I can do about it.

 

Lessons on Leaving

Lessons on Leaving

Now that I am mere days away from moving, I am ready to reflect on the lessons I’ve learned about leaving. And they have been, for better or worse, a learning experience in hope, fear, love and loss.

This journey began close to two years ago when my husband left, lost, and stayed too long at a job he once loved. My husband is nothing if not extremely resilient and never, ever have I seen him become defeated – not when he began a new job search, not when his job coach died in the midst of his search, not when his wife again and again and again broke down in fear.

On a Thursday, five months after his former job ended, Tom was offered a new job in a new city; they wanted him to start on Tuesday. He was in his truck on his way home from a second interview when he called to tell me. I couldn’t speak for the words caught in my throat. “Tuesday? They want you to start on Tuesday?”

A day earlier, a normal Wednesday, I was securely living my life with my husband nearby and I had grown used to his company. Then he moved away.

But a short time later I had one son home and then two and I relished playing the stay-at-home mom to my beloved boys, minus carpools and powerlifting meets and dinners strung together with tape and glue. They were company when I needed it and help when I asked for it, but when the days grew shorter and boxes piled higher, I knew the end of my last summer in this home was coming to an end.

As Son Number One drove away in his car and Son Number Two was driven away by his dad’s side I watched with one little dog in my arms and another sitting obediently by my side.

Life is loss and though I have likely been spared much more than most, each time there is a little and a little more, I cling a little more tightly to what is left. And just as me, and what I felt I had left, were finished adjusting to just the three of us: small dog, big dog and me, big dog died. But not before biting me and taking with him not just a part of my ear but another chunk of what was left.

I rebounded just a bit and people swooped in on me and called me “resilient” and “brave” and “full of courage.” That’s what people do when they see you struggle but regain your footing sometime later.

As 2015 turned to 2016 I chose a word for my new year and it was “do.” First on my list of to-do’s, and, lately, it seems like the last thing as well, is packing. Because when you are making a move there is stuff to pack and clean and change and push and shove out a quickly-closing door.

And so finally, now that people are asking me exactly when it is I am moving I am finding that it feels a little like I am already gone. Because a year ago I let my fear and loss, bury my hope and love. When I am afraid people will leave me or pull away, it’s easier if I just do it myself. And so I did. Because I don’t like to linger because it hurts too much and I am always sure that I know what will happen and that it won’t be good.

Former City Girl, meet Country Girl. I am always free to take what I’ve lost and make it something new. We all are. So here I go moving from a non-acre home to more than 60 acres with a home built just a wee bit on the rustic side with logs lining my living room and stone stretching to the ceiling.

I can be no more lost or lonely on lots of land than I am on little land. When hope and love seems hard to find and accept and draw through the blood-filled veins of your life, it’s the same no matter where you live. Do a new thing, do the thing I don’t think I can do. New thing, hard thing, thing I need to learn to do, here we go….