She did go down too. Smacked her forehead on the sidewalk and lay there in a puddle of diet soda she’d gone to the store to buy, and in confusion she was certain that everything was melting like ice cream and she was melting too, down and down, into the sidewalk and beyond. She tilts her head back now and lifts her hands to make a paddling motion. She says that’s how it felt, and she wonders if she looked like a stranded bug, and she wonders how long she lay there. What’s curious is that in this friendly town, where everyone seems to know everyone, no one came to help. But maybe no one saw her. She can’t imagine people saw her and didn’t help. It’s not what we do, she says. Even the people who aren’t particularly nice would have at least called 911. No one wants a teenager gasping and slobbering on his front walk.
It was dark when she was able to right herself, and when she did, she knew she wasn’t far from home. Four houses to the corner. Turn right. Three blocks more, and there would be her house. She was so relieved to know where she was, she almost peed herself. (Okay, she says. Correction: She didn’t almost pee herself. That is one problem she doesn’t have.) Anyway, she stood on the sidewalk, then gathered up her purse and wobbled home, passing neighbors taking in groceries, kids screaming through their games in the dark. The lost feeling was over, but she still felt vacant, abstracted, the way you do after someone you love very much has died and you have to move through a world that has no idea something terrible has happened. Putting one heavy foot in front of another, Kristin remembers seeing the light of the back porch shining across the wet lawn of her backyard and feeling so relieved when she walked through the gate that she bowed her head to the grass and just smelled the green earth.
Quite a surprise for her dad when he walked out and saw her smelling the ground. The next day they had a Serious Talk about Drugs, but no way was she going to tell her dad what had happened the night before. She nodded and promised to just say no. (And she meant it, she says. Drugs. Seriously? With a head like mine already packed for somewhere else?)
It all became a big deal when she got disoriented in her own high school and fainted in a hallway. Except her eyes were open—can you faint with your eyes open? Well, I did, she says. She remembers looking up at fluorescent lights and ceiling tiles. At first, everyone thought she was just being a drama queen. But when it happened a second and third time, school counselors encouraged her parents to take her for a medical evaluation. The counselors said that if Kristin was putting this on, the performance likely wouldn’t survive a couple of cold rounds on an examining table. If there was a medical problem, it could be diagnosed and treated. And if medical tests didn’t find anything, a therapist might help.
Her folks love her, she says, and they had no reason not to trust her, but honestly, this was all coming up as a fake to them. She is still angry about that. She’s also scared shitless about the dizzy spells that sometimes take her to the ground. Fear seems to make them happen more often and worse. She props one foot on her opposite knee. She picks at the rubber sole of her Converse Chucks, covered in little hearts. A whole lot of doctors, she says. She can’t remember them all. A blur of people over her head, not talking straight to her, like she was a thing instead of a human. “‘Thing,’” she says, making air quotes again, and looks away.
Medical tests were inconclusive. There was no concrete explanation, but she was prescribed some pills. The pills left her apathetic, and she sank into a dangerous depression. No one had any idea what was happening. She says they still don’t. When she fell to the asphalt while crossing a city street and was unable to speak to her father upon waking, the teenager was hospitalized. More tests. More therapists. Kristin was finally diagnosed with acute panic attacks, but medical and mental health professionals couldn’t pinpoint the cause and tried a number of treatments that didn’t succeed. She participated in talk circles, drew pictures, and role-played with dolls before a series of strangers. She missed the last three months of tenth grade and was told she would probably have to repeat the year.
Kristin describes her episodes in Harry Potter terms and wonders if author Rowling modeled the Dementors on a condition she herself knew all too well—the sudden sink of depression; the unexplainable, overwhelming grief; and the breathless sensation of falling. Kristin can’t be sure if she falls before the sensation or after it, but she’s planted her face on concrete a few times. She wishes the attacks gave her more warning than they do. She used to be a confident person, but now she no longer trusts herself to do anything alone. She’s seen padded helmets for epileptics. She thinks she needs but would never wear one.
When she finally went back to school, Kristin went back skinny. She went back different. Withdrawn and cautious. She threw up her Pop-Tart first thing on the first day, so the word went around she was anorexic. Her friends acted uncertain, and her teachers were suddenly big and cheerful. Aware of their falseness, Kristin felt more isolated. She started dreading school. She began to feign illness in order to skip out entirely. Therapists recommended a school/camp combo for teenagers with similar conditions, but Kristin was walked out and talked out and resistant to the whole idea. Her parents struggled with the decision to send her away against her will. Her mother was afraid that away from home, she would sink too far down to survive.
Even though Kristin’s episodes don’t happen every day, or even every week, they have totally altered her. She remembers what it was like not to wonder if she’d make it down a hallway without falling; not to wonder if, when she set out for home, or school, or work, she’d actually get there.
She searches for a better way to explain.
She says the first time she saw Jaws, she was just a kid. She left her friend’s house, where they’d played the movie on a big-ass home theater, and as she walked down the street, shaken, she kept imagining a shark roaring upward out of the asphalt. “That’s it! That’s it!” she says, stabbing at the table with an index finger. “Now that’s what it feels like to suddenly be lost. Just when you think you are fine, it rushes up out of nowhere, takes you down and down, and swallows you whole.” She sits back, satisfied to have nailed the comparison. Between the Dementors and Bruce the Shark, her episodes make one helluva day.
When a service dog was suggested as a possible support therapy for her condition, the first name she thought of for the dog was Placebo. Fatigue, frustration, and anger made her sarcastic. She told them she wasn’t stupid enough to be distracted with a pet. She has seen guide dogs for the blind, and, on television, a documentary piece about seizure-response dogs, but she could not imagine how a dog could do anything useful for her.
Enter Juice Box, who came with another name but quickly earned a nickname from Kristin. Juice Box had previously worked for an elderly man who had balance problems and trouble carrying things, and the man had died. The dog was still young; he was friendly, obedience and service trained, and, as one counselor put it, more than a little lost without something to do. That persuasion seemed transparent. Her parents were more open to the idea of a service dog than she was, even though the family had never had a dog and she had never asked for one. No one would drop it, and Kristin finally agreed just to shut them up.
She had thought the coming dog would be a German shepherd, like the guide dogs she had seen, but when Juice Box arrived, he was a surprise all around. He’s a super-confident, big I-don’t-know-what, she says. Boxer in there somewhere, maybe Lab. He is brown and weighs almost as much as she does. He has strange rough fur, a huge nose, and then kind of wide but delicate paws. Cute though. This big wide, grinning face. He is big enough to steady her if she gets lightheaded, and he came already able to lead her someplace to sit down if things got bad. The plan was they would teach Juice Box to help her stay safe when she got disoriented, lead her home, maybe, and if he could do those things, it might go a long way to getting Kristin back to the life she had lost.
Juice Box is interesting because he’s smart, but he’s funny too, and she had not expected that. This dog is a total ham. He is cr
azy for tricks. He can carry things without dropping them—a cookie on a plate! A TV remote, without changing the channel! It was awesome the first time he did that. He will put his paws up on her shoulders and dance. She says The Juice is totally jacked. The slang goes over my head, but I hear the affection in Kristin’s voice.
“What does your dog do most for you?” I ask. She says, “Shit-I-don’t-know,” straightaway, and then she pauses, thinks about it. She says that even in the small town she’s known all her life, she became afraid to go anywhere. She can get so scared about another lost event that she doesn’t trust herself to get from A to B. But Kristin trusts Juice Box. They started small: From the yard to the front door. From the street to the front door. From one house away to home, and then from two. Kristin has passed her neighbors’ houses with such attention that she knows what hours their sprinkler systems start. Juice Box has learned his task so well, he’s made it possible for her to leave home and come back again.
Actually, when she thinks about it, she says, Juice Box does more than that. His presence made things better at school too. Kristin says she’s never minded getting attention—she wants to major in theater if she can get it together enough to go to college—but at school she felt exposed after she got sick. She kind of hunched over and scuttled between classes, and the longer it went on, the more she got pissed off. She added a couple of piercings to say she was okay, goddamn it, and then there was this point when she started twisting and playing with her hair and finding reasons to be alone so she could twist it until she’d pulled some out.
Then Juice Box started going to school with her. He couldn’t be a bigger, hairier beacon that something’s wrong with her, and at first she dreaded that, but Kristin says people at school were so interested in him that she was off the hook. They still stared, but instead of staring at her, they smiled at him, and then at her, like she was his friggin’ posse—she laughs—and that became a sort of way back in to normal. Teachers lightened up too, like the dog would make everything right. How can people have so much faith? Kristin wonders. But Juice Box does make things better, actually. He got used to her sequence of classes. He walks a little faster to the rooms he really likes. Kristin’s teachers joke they wish they had Juice Box and her in every class; students seem better behaved around him, as though subconsciously everyone wants to impress the dog. “Hey, Juice Box, hey, Kristin,” people say, the way they say hey to anyone else. Kristin doesn’t mind taking second billing to her dog. At the moment she prefers it.
She likes looking down to the dog that rests beside her. He’s a proud dog, she says. He’s my rock star. It didn’t take him long to know she was his to take care of.
Kristin and her dad taught Juice Box how to find places farther from home. He was used to carrying things and picking up canes mostly, so this psych dog stuff was all new to him, but he seemed to enjoy the walks that got longer and longer and went farther and farther. There was this goal of Kristin being able to walk to school and back alone and to believe that she would get there. Kristin and her father worked to teach that to Juice Box. Somehow the twice-daily walks with the dog took some of the heat off their relationship. Kristin was less angry. Her father seemed less sad. She thinks now that Juice Box knows the words for the ten places she most commonly goes. School was the first he learned, of course, and friends’ houses and her new job, where she’s learning how to—get this—train dogs! Kristin’s more independent now. She says she can think about being able to go away to college, maybe, and believe it might be possible.
Kristin describes the first time she walked out to the neighborhood park not far from her house. She and Juice Box started off to this place she knew well as a child (she has a scar from a headfirst trip down the slide when she was nine), and they walked there and back one night. Not so big a deal for most people—there were little kids there who knew their own way home in the dark—but it was the first time she’d been out alone in a long time. And at night! They got to the playground; while Juice Box watched, Kristin sat in a rubber swing and wound its chains so she could spin out of the twist a few times. She tilted back as she spun and watched the stars wheel. Then she and Juice Box walked back to their house. Not so big a deal, and at the same time, it was huge. The park is only a street away, but Kristin saw her parents standing in the doorway beneath the porch light, her mother weeping, her father beaming. They were all trying so hard to act casual. “No applause, no applause,” Kristin said, laughing, as she walked up the driveway with Juice Box, but when she got to her folks, she made a big stage bow, right and left.
18
I DON’T OFTEN FEEL LOST, and even if lost happens, I’m not usually frightened by it. Perhaps my twenty-five years as a pilot makes some kind of difference, with its emphasis on knowing where you are or being able to figure it out if for some reason your flight goes astray. Probably the twelve years in ground search-and-rescue contribute to some confidence too. Orientation is a huge part of what we do as searchers—it’s not only about finding the missing persons, but also about knowing where you are so you can get them back to safety.
The most lost I’ve ever felt was in a moment when I knew exactly where I was. It happened while I was piloting an airplane that had a major electrical failure as I was en route to a city several hours away. I was flying in the clouds on an instrument flight plan, no visual contact with the horizon or the ground below. The weather was overcast, heavy, sullen—solid IFR (instrument flight rules) above and below. An alternator failure had been disguised by a glitch of faulty wiring, and when the battery too began to give out, I heard the radio distort and saw the electrically driven navigation instruments begin to falter.
The controllers and I knew what was coming and had minutes enough to make a plan. These kinds of events are rare, but there are backup safety procedures. I had solid information about where I was, what terrain lay below, and the condition of the aircraft. We had physical maps. There were instruments in the airplane that were not electrical for just this reason. Nonetheless, I felt a sick little moment of thrill when radio navigation and communication failed, and I was still in an airplane ghosting forward through the clouds. Instrument flight can be very like a dream state to begin with—all that milky white above, below, and all around; the tangibles are on your instrument panel, and there’s a special kind of quiet on an instrument flight when some of them go and your connection to earth falls away. It can feel a little naked, like the worst of your vulnerable dreams. A pilot can’t stay naked long.
The good news: When electrical systems fail, a pilot still knows power, heading, airspeed, attitude (wings level or banked, for example), climbing or descending or straight and level—and the backup procedures for this kind of situation that have been hammered into us at every level of flight training, from beginner to advanced. Those procedures work, if the pilot adapts quickly. It takes discipline not to get spooked.
I followed those procedures, and I didn’t get spooked, but I still remember that loss of radio navigation and contact, the brief surge of peril. When people who have disorientation episodes tell me what it feels like to have the known world fall away, I think back to that moment in the clouds, and I try to imagine what it would be to feel that lost not for just a moment, but for an interim that must feel like forever.
Feels like forever is about right, I’m told.
There are all kinds of lost, or forms of disorientation, to use the clinical term. A person can be disoriented in space, in time, and in person. The first two I can more immediately understand; being lost in person, much less so. Participants in mental-health forums describe these situations vividly.
There is lost in terms of location, of course, where landmark recognition and basic orientation skills are gone. What would it be like not to know your own house or arrive at your workplace and have no idea where to go next? I have searched for missing people with these kinds of disorders, people who, unable to recognize locations they should know well, simply hide wherever they find
themselves or follow the path of least resistance, taking a sidewalk or street or well-trodden path wherever it leads. For those who critically wander, the inability to orient to landmarks plus the inability to measure the passage of time can be a dangerous combination.
For some, the concept of time is difficult to keep hold of. Many of us might relate to situations where time passed too quickly or crept too slowly, but we can typically recognize when something takes about an hour or that it’s getting late and supper should be soon. Many of us get up at roughly the same time, feeling the hour rather than knowing it. But there are people who cannot feel the progression of a day. The nice long walk they plan to take might turn out to be a quick out-the-door-turn-around-and-back-again, while a half-hour prep for work stretches into three hours and the surprise of an angry phone call from the boss. Some can’t figure out when to go to bed. Some go to bed only to get straight up again. Pots boil dry on the stove. The problem puts a strain on families and makes it difficult for a person to hold down a job. “It’s not that I can’t tell time,” one woman tells me, “it’s that sometimes I have no internal measure.” She has flooded a bathroom before, starting the tub and walking into the next room for what feels like a moment and is actually more than an hour.
There’s also lost in terms of identity, a dissociative state where individuals don’t recognize their own faces, for example, or connect their hands to themselves, or, in some cases, have a real sense of who they are. The failure to recognize can carry over to friends and family, literally estranging the sufferer from everyone, including himself.
For some, lost can mean a terrifying mixture of two or more of these. I don’t know where I am or how long I’ve been here and I have no idea what to do to make this right. That’s LOST in all caps, says one commentator, a hopeless not knowing what to do in the next minute, or the next day, or for the rest of your life somewhere out there in the void.
The Possibility Dogs Page 17