Hungry (28 page)

No one could say. How awful is that. Our little airplane was sputtering, with nowhere to land. But to Lisa we came up with concrete possibilities: a halfway house for a while, home, Santa Cruz, anyplace other than Santa Cruz. We’d figure it out. Don’t worry. We all love you. Please believe us, wrinkled and weary as we are, as if we know. Lisa’s question rebounded off every plan in our minds: “But where will
I
live?”

Once Scott was able to negotiate with the landlord and find a new tenant, we drove down to get Lisa’s clothes. Scott was stoic, packing and labeling boxes, as usual getting the job done, making it easier for us. He would get a storage unit for the furniture and cookware.

On the drive back, instead of “if only” we lapsed into a litany of how things could be worse. Not the unspeakably worst, but that she could have had an incurable disease. Or we could have been destitute, had no health insurance, hated each other, and been screaming about every little decision. At this point, we still had hope that one of the medications would kick in and Lisa would return to normal, a fantasy that struck us as funny because we are not optimists. Quite the opposite, and yet here we were again, the critic and the grump, playing the Glad Game. The name of the game comes from an early twentieth-century series of books, but we knew only the Disney version. In the 1960 movie
Pollyanna
, blond Hayley Mills is the poor but sunny orphan child who makes the best of all bad situations. The Glad Game was invented by her sainted father. When he wrote to a charity and asked if they could please send his daughter a doll at Christmas, there was a mix-up and instead of a doll they sent a set of child’s crutches. She could be glad about getting the crutches, he said,
because she didn’t need them
!

The Glad Game became the all-purpose fetish for me, especially. Ned was less into it. But when we hit bottom, I could say: “We’re so lucky. Lisa’s in the hospital and nobody can figure out what to do, but it’s a world-class hospital and only three miles from our house!” And when we just needed a laugh: “We’re glad that the hospital has such a nice cafeteria!”

Turn the Glad Game inside out and you have Catastrophic Expectations, our other go-to fetish. We found that you can dim their power just by writing them down.

Years ago, one of mine was: “The neighborhood teenagers drive too fast and will run over my children.” Time passed and I rechecked the list. My children were teenagers themselves. Now there was real reason for worry. They were the drivers. They could run over somebody else’s children.

More recently: “Lisa can’t find work. She will be jobless, then homeless, then have needle-pocked arms and eat out of garbage cans.” Am I really worried about a death spiral like this? Yes, but I try to put it on the shelf with global depression, war, climate change, and massive earthquake, all of which are happening or going to happen to some degree. What can I do to influence events or prepare for disaster? I support Lisa’s treatment. I drive her, I listen, I build up a nest egg for her, I sign off every phone call with “I love you.” The likelihood of the Catastrophic Expecation (hers and ours) that she ends up living on the street? Come on. Lisa is three courses away from graduating college. She is not refusing help nor using crystal meth. She’s afraid of needles, for heavens’ sake!

Many of us have always lived in fear of doing the wrong thing and causing irreparable harm. But when you become pregnant, the possibility is real. The rational path is to prepare, study, learn, adapt.

I have never let go of Catastrophic Expectations. They don’t cover what actually happens, we hope, but when your child is seriously ill, the sun may as well not come up in the morning. Angry mythical gods are laughing at you, bellowing: “You thought you could raise children and keep them safe? We’ve let you come this far, but now you’re going to know the truth!” Having children forces you to concede that you’re just one of the deeply flawed mortals, and now you have another life to protect. Whatever thought or action that may help is worth trying, including fetishes and talismans, to make her well again.

Ned and I also dove into our own little obsessions. He loves to study other cultures and plan trips. He planned a lot of fantasy trips during those years. For me, tennis became a bit of a fetish. I joined a league and welcomed the spring season of tournaments on TV, a mix of drama and hypnosis that can go on longer than a football game. Playing tennis, I might wear the lucky shorts, socks, sweat band. I might repeat a mantra in my head, like, “We are winners! Winners don’t quit!” Most usefully, though, playing a sport reminds you that when a strategy or technique isn’t working, don’t keep using it. This is a useful rule in medicine.

We made deals, of course. Please make Lisa better, and we’ll be much better people. We said “Lisa Himmel” for many years at the moment in the Sabbath service when congregants softly speak the names of those in need of healing. We talked with Lisa about places we’d go when she got better. Ned made up a game in the hospital called Improve with Improv, trying to remind Lisa of the fun they used to have with improvisational games, and watching the TV show
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
He’d pick up an object and invent its function, a game called Props. Then it would be Lisa’s turn to make up a use for the spoon or stuffed animal. She could never do it.

We seriously considered nonconventional therapies. A neighbor recommended a faith healer, and we took the phone number but never called. We investigated a brain-imaging company in San Francisco that claimed success with eating disorders. More recent research has lent credence to this technique, because bulimics often show less activity among the neural pathways that help control impulsivity. But at the time, brain scanning for eating disorders wasn’t widely known and we dropped the idea.

Instead, we went to Chimayo to collect “healing dirt.”

Chimayo, New Mexico, is the little town between Santa Fe and Albuquerque some call the Lourdes of America. I was more than skeptical, but Ned loves to discover offbeat sites, even if they aren’t about food. Lisa was starting her sophomore year of college, very lonely, bulimic, and depressed. We had escaped to Santa Fe for a couple of days, so why not check out the healing dirt.

Chimayo does not make a powerful first impression. You can drive into town, but there is nowhere to park unless you are disabled or a souvenir vendor. The rest of us park in a field and walk a quarter-mile dirt path, along a chain-link fence full of fading flowers and photographs, like the makeshift memorials often posted on highways and railroad crossings where people have died. When we got closer to the fence, we could see that there were also lots of crosses made from twigs. They were little shrines for beloved family, from wrinkled patriarchs to heartbreakingly happy-looking children.

As the modest adobe church came into view, I had to look at Ned and ask, “We drove two hours for
this
?” Except for people sitting on the ground selling religious items, Chimayo looked like a very small Southwestern theme park in its off-season.

With a handful of elderly people, we entered El Santuario. Daylight poked through one unceremonial window, so that at first it was hard to see what was there, but there wasn’t much. Wooden benches, candles, a simple altar, a total lack of grandeur. To the side was a room with crutches, no longer needed. The small back room held the healing dirt, in a round pit in the ground. Everyone seemed to understand that we were allowed to scoop out a little, but there was no sign, no guard, and no explanation of the dirt’s holiness.

We took our turn, filling a small plastic medicine bottle, and stood there for a few minutes to make sure we weren’t missing anything about the Lourdes of America.

At home, we gave some dirt to Lisa, and saved some for ourselves. Lisa carried hers around in her purse for a while, and I have to say, that time coincided with her getting a lot better. Within months she got the job at O’Neill, got more interested in school, met Scott, and moved into a much better living situation. That is why we keep our holy dirt in the medicine cabinet, just in case. We also bought silver earrings from a Native American vendor on the sidewalk around the square in Santa Fe. She told us the symbols meant healing for Lisa and peace for me.

That was the start of the collection of oddments. Anything that mentioned healing, we latched onto. A friend of Ned’s gave Lisa a clear, smooth stone with an angel in it. On a trip to Israel, we bought a keychain in the shape of a hand, the Kabbalah version of warding off the evil eye.

A friend studying Japanese calligraphy made a beautiful painting using pictograms saying: “Out of pain, joy is born.” We had to have it.

If a friend or family member wants to visit a patient at Stanford Hospital’s eating disorders ward for adolescents, first they have to know it isn’t at Stanford. These patients, up to fifteen at a time, are housed at El Camino Hospital, ten miles away. You can’t just walk in. It is a locked facility, with evening visiting hours. When researching this book, during the time Lisa was in college and doing well, I asked if there was a standard tour for parents that I could join. There isn’t. Individual tours are by appointment only.

Here there are girls, mostly in their teens but some as young as eight, in wheelchairs with intravenous tubes, bent over and drawn, as in a nursing home. At a distance, they could be grandmothers. Most of the patients have anorexia, which is harder to conceal than bulimia. They are little skeletons, with flat hair and bad skin, some with downy body hair. It seems to me that anorexia attacks the body somewhat like progeria, the rare disease that also strikes in childhood or young adulthood, causing premature aging. Initially, the Stanford adolescent patients are “on beds,” which means bed rest, until their medical stability is established. One patient sits on her bed with a heart monitor and a portable commode.

The schedule features a pet visiting service twice a month and theater groups twice a month. Otherwise, from 7:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. the schedule, at least on paper, has a narcoleptic sameness. Vital signs are taken eight times a day. Patients are weighed, without their being able to see, each morning. Nurses wear pagers connected to patients with bad heart rhythms.

Patients stay from two weeks to two months. A teacher from the Mountain View School District works with them on weekdays from 10:15 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.

Parents of younger patients may request that they not mix with the older patients, justifiably fearful that they’ll get new ideas about starving themselves. Some of the patients’ identities are confidential. As at celebrity hospitals, if people call for them and the caller isn’t on the approved list, nobody will let on that they’re here.

When I visited in March 2007, the ED patients ranged from eleven to nineteen years old, but staff had been seeing an increase in eight- and nine-year-olds. About one in ten was a boy. A sizeable minority comes through twice, and there’s handful of what in hospital lingo are called “frequent fliers.”

Three months later, all of this research went from my notebook to my gut, when Lisa’s eating disorders landed her in another locked ward, and she became one of the young women who looked very old.

But first, we made a detour, with the forbidden iPod, to Arizona.

 

 

 

Lisa and I took the one-hour flight to Phoenix, she in sullen resignation, me trying to lighten the mood with talk of what we’d do when we all got back together. I brought food. Before we got off the plane, I had Lisa give me her iPod, which wasn’t allowed at the center. At the baggage claim, the center’s driver met us and scooped Lisa and her duffel bag into an industrial-size van in the adjoining parking structure. It took maybe five minutes from hello. Suddenly the van was driving away, with Lisa the only passenger, and her head barely visible. I had kissed her and told her I loved her, so many people loved her, reassured her that her life would get better, but now I wanted her back. Maybe it would help if she heard all of that one more time. I stood in the garage and studied the parking space where they’d just been. I tried to tell myself what I’d just told Lisa, that things would get better. This place would help her.

Back inside the airport, I had a book and two hours till my flight home. Ah, I could have music, I remembered, since I had Lisa’s iPod. But I didn’t. It wasn’t in my purse or pockets or the bag of food I’d brought. I raced back to the baggage claim, then to the helpdesk, security, and the Southwest Airlines counter, to see if anyone had turned in the iPod. They hadn’t. I left our phone number at each place. Later we found out that Lisa had snuck it back into her purse. Deceitfulness is also one of the warning signs of eating disorders.

 

lisa:
As soon as we arrived, I knew someone had made a grave mistake. The brochure had deceived me and all other patients. The small converted bed-and-breakfast ranch secluded in the desert was less a comforting home away from home than a small prison where all my necessities would be taken away or monitored. That meant shampoo, toothpaste, razors, anything with alcohol in the first three ingredients, my iPod, and my backpack. The therapist also took away the book I’d brought, because it was about a young woman and too closely related to eating disorders. I wasn’t
that
bad off. Anyone who saw me wouldn’t have guessed I had an eating disorder, right? I weighed 104 pounds, not big, but not starving by any means. Granted my body was shaking as they tried to take my blood pressure and heart rate, and a blond Kirsten Dunst look-alike demanded, “Hold still!” After my vitals and EKG were completed, the insurance coordinator came in and greeted me with a cheerful yet seemingly insincere smile. “Hi, Lisa, welcome to the center. I’m Susan.” She extended her hand. “I hope you got here okay? Now it’s time for lunch!” I tried to answer: “Oh, I already ate . . .” She grabbed my arm and led me to the office, which was really a large portable building.