by Laurie Gough
“But wait,” I said. “If OCD is so easily curable through hypnotism, why doesn’t everyone with OCD do it?”
“Because people think it’s too out there, too unscientific.”
“But people with OCD, and parents with kids with OCD, will try anything. We’re desperate,” I told her. “That’s how I feel right now. If it really worked to cure OCD, wouldn’t people be shouting it from the rooftops? It would be a massive breakthrough.” As it was, I couldn’t find any research claiming hypnotism worked for OCD at all. Nothing. Still, I was calling her anyway.
“It works ninety-three percent of the time,” she stated. “And cognitive behaviour therapy only works twenty-eight percent of the time.”
I felt like asking her where she was getting her statistics. Perhaps I should have hung up right then, but, instead, I made an appointment with her, which shows my level of despair at the time. It was easy to get an appointment right away, which maybe should have told me something.
On the drive to Aylmer, Quinn rolled down the window five separate times to stick his head out in the wind, put his hand on his heart, and ask his grandpa to come back.
“I think this woman might be able to help you, Quinn,” I said, between bouts of window unwinding. “You know how I’ve been telling you that story about running on the beach at night and it helps you relax and sleep? I think this woman will do something like that, only better. She sounded really nice on the phone.”
Quinn just stared out the window at the passing trees of Gatineau Park. The leaves were drifting down like broken feathers in the wind, while all around us the colour was leaching from the landscape.
The hypnotherapist held her sessions in her split-level house in a seventies-era suburban neighbourhood where the wide Ottawa River was so close you could hear its waves lapping ashore. After we met her in the front hall and talked a little, she took Quinn into her living room and asked me to come back in forty-five minutes. I waited in the car and read an old National Geographic I found in the back seat. When I came back, she asked to talk to me in private. Quinn went out to the car.
“I think it went really well,” she said excitedly.
“Really? That’s fantastic!”
“I got him into a relaxed state, then got him to choose these plastic foot shapes from a basket.” She pointed to some coloured insoles lined up in her living room. “I asked him to choose a pair of feet for himself, then pairs of feet for the people in his life that he’s closest to. I got him to line these feet up next to each other. He put your dad’s feet next to his, then yours, your husband’s, and your mother’s were all next to your dad’s. Then I got him to stand on his own coloured feet and say how he felt. He spoke to your dad and said he wanted him back. Then I got him to stand on your dad’s feet and talk in your dad’s voice. When he stood on these big feet of your dad’s, he said, ‘Quinn, I want you to be the happy Quinn you always were, who loves soccer and running and riding your unicycle. Happy.’”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “That sounds like a really cool technique.” I felt like I could finally breathe. I hadn’t felt this kind of lightness in a long time.
She continued, saying that when she tried to get Quinn to move his foot shapes forward, and do the same with mine and Rob’s, he didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to leave Grandpa’s feet behind. “So I told him, ‘Quinn, Grandpa isn’t happy. He’s having trouble moving on to where he needs to go because you keep calling him back.’ After a while, he finally moved the feet forward. I think you’ll see a huge change in him now.”
“That’s brilliant,” I said. “I’m so grateful!”
“Yeah, I learned that technique from my teacher. He’s a genius.” Her eyes were like two shiny pennies.
After paying her $125 cash, I couldn’t wait to get out to the car to see Quinn.
Journal
I’m sitting on an outdoor bench on this chilly evening while Quinn is practising soccer drills with his teammates. They’re running around in T-shirts despite the cold. We just came from Aylmer. Even from this distance I can still see Quinn doing his usual OCD jerking movements. I was so hoping the hypnotherapy worked. But maybe it did work a little on some level. At the very least it might have worked as grief counselling. As soon as we started the car and got back on the road toward home, he rolled down the window to start the same old routine. I felt my heart slide right into my feet. I wonder if I should tell the hypnotherapist. She seemed pretty convinced she’d cured him.
Two teenage girls are having a conversation in French beside me. They’re looking at their phones and laughing. I have that feeling I’ve had before when you see people going on about their normal lives and you realize you’re not one of them anymore, that the fabric of your life has a hole in it. It seems impossible to understand how the people around you can feel happiness and laugh. People have no idea how easily broken life is, how it can all change on a dime. You blink and then when you look at the world again you’ve lost your bearings.
CHAPTER 16
That week, I came across a YouTube video of a Dr. Phil show called “Inside the World of OCD.” The first part of the video was so disturbing I kept hitting the pause button. It took me three tries before I finally got through the whole thing. It showed footage of a young man who I kept thinking could be Quinn one day. This guy regularly goes in and out of OCD trances and can barely function — his whole life has been crippled by OCD — while his poor parents watch helplessly, hoping for a miracle. Then Dr. Phil introduced a neuroradiologist named Dr. Jabour who runs a clinic in Los Angeles and treats people with OCD. He uses something called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is supposedly a non-invasive procedure that sends magnetic impulses to the brain to stimulate certain neurons associated with OCD. He’s had a lot of success curing people. I was so buoyed by the video that I sent Dr. Jabour an email asking if we could fly Quinn out there to try it. Not long after I sent the email, a woman from Dr. Jabour’s clinic called to say that they don’t treat people until they’re at least sixteen because their brains haven’t fully developed yet.
Journal
I’m walking along River Road again tonight. Now when I look up into the stars, I get no comfort whatsoever. No worries are taken away, there are no eternities to fall into. At this moment, I feel so crushed by the weight of the sky that I can’t imagine life ever getting better again. I want to fall into a black hole.
The email from Dr. Jabour’s office dashed another hope today. This whole journey is such an emotional roller coaster. I keep getting moments of false hope where it seems like things will be okay again — when Quinn actually goes through several OCD-free minutes — but then the shock of reality hits when I see he’s come up with something new. Tonight he refused dessert — he never refuses dessert — because he told himself if he ate it, Grandpa wouldn’t come back. And then yet another new behaviour: clenching his fists into tight balls. Even my trying to put him into the relaxed state before bed isn’t working any more. And forget reading to him at night now, which I’ve been doing ever since he was a baby. How could he even hear me when he’s talking to my dad while I’m trying to read?
I would gladly give up every single possession I own, toss it all away without a thought, give away our home with everything in it, if it meant getting Quinn back. I’d happily walk barefoot and homeless down this road if I could walk with a carefree, healthy Quinn.
I’m learning I have to enjoy the hopeful moments when they come, otherwise what do I have? I’ve always been a naturally optimistic person. People have often described me as fun and exuberant, full of happy, infectious energy. But I can’t even remember that person right now. This is a test beyond anything I’ve ever endured. This makes teaching on the native reserve on James Bay when I was twenty-five a cakewalk. This makes Quinn’s colic followed by two years of sleep deprivation a joke. I’d kill to go back to that time. What’s a little lost sleep? I re
member feeling desperate when I was twenty and hitchhiking in Oregon. I was so lost and aimless that I didn’t know which side of the road to stand on to get a ride, whether I should go north to my old life or south to a new one. If only I’d known something like this would come someday, something truly hard. On second thought, I wouldn’t have wanted to know that.
I stop walking to gaze up at the zillions of cold-hearted stars pinpricking the sky. Will Quinn ever look up this far into the night sky or will he be a child with a starless universe?
Oh, God, if you’re out there, please hear me: I want my son back.
At times I’ve prayed to a God I was hoping, against all evidence and logic, somehow existed. This can happen even to atheists when we’re trudging through the emotional trenches. In times of crisis, like now, I’ve fallen back to my childhood notion of God, whom I came to love when I was eight. This happened to me because for a few years as a kid, I went to church by myself, a lone believer in a family of agnostics. I went because I wanted to be in the church choir with my best friend Julie. Singing was fun, no matter that I wasn’t a very good singer. One year we got to perform Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and I sang the lyrics at home continually, annoying my sister so much that she used to kick me under the kitchen table to shut me up. I even went to a church camp where our born-again seventeen-year-old counsellor, Joni, told me I better get my parents to invite Jesus into their hearts or they wouldn’t be going to heaven. This kept me up at night. I thought my mom would be okay since she’d gone to church as a kid so probably at some point had invited Jesus into her heart even though she’d forgotten he was in there. But I was sure my dad had never done any inviting of that kind. I decided that when I got home, I’d work on my dad in a religious sense, get him to see the light. I remember tiptoeing into his room one morning, leaning down next to him as he slept, and whispering, “Jesus, come into my heart. Come in, Jesus. I invite you in.” I’d learned about subliminal advertising and brainwashing in school and I thought my dad might start dreaming the words I was whispering and that would be good enough for Jesus. “Jesus,” I whispered a little louder, “you’re welcome in my heart. Come in, please.” I kept that up for a while until my dad made a grunting noise and his eyes flew open. I recall him asking what I was doing. “Just, you know, nothing really,” I answered.
I don’t remember when I stopped believing in God. It must have been a gradual awakening over the years, deprogramming from those early years of going to church, and learning science instead. I remember once hiking in British Columbia’s interior, searching for a cabin at the trail’s end. After a few hours I lost the trail in the suddenly deep June snow. Somehow I ended up on an icy mountainside where one wrong move and I’d tumble to my death into a canyon. As I traversed the treacherously steep snowfield in my running shoes, I heard myself suddenly crying out, “Please, God, please God,” over and over. When I made it to the other side intact I felt an ecstatic kind of bliss that maybe only occurs in that sort of situation. I wonder if I’d have prayed like that if I hadn’t gone to church as a kid. Likely not. But in those few moments it really did feel like I wasn’t alone, that I was calling out to my childhood God. Later, I would learn that the same parts of the brain are active when you pray as when you’re interacting with other people, so of course it “feels” as if someone is there. Also, perhaps this feeling was the result of millions of years of evolution, and that those who believed in gods passed on those genes because believing in gods helped us survive. It’s an enormous comfort to believe in the magic of a god.
I needed some of that magical comfort in my life again. “Please, God,” I’d whisper into the dark at 3:00 a.m. some nights in bed. “Please let Quinn be okay. Please.” Although every time I’d say this I was met with the eerie feeling that my prayer wasn’t so different from Quinn uttering, “Please come back.”
Magical thinking was all around me that fall.
CHAPTER 17
“Should we race, Quinn?” asked my friend Stephan as the three of us pedalled our bikes along a path into Gatineau Park. Every time Stephan visited us from northern Ontario, we’d go for at least one major bike ride. Quinn always loved it, tearing ahead of us over the dirt trails, flying down steep wooded hills, getting his legs scratched up by blackberry bushes, negotiating hairpin curves that I’d never consider except by foot.
“Yes!”shouted Quinn. I watched as the two of them sped ahead, and gripped my handlebars tighter than usual, watching to see if the OCD bully was anywhere nearby. So far, biking fast through the woods seemed to be like soccer, exhilarating enough and demanding enough concentration that OCD had no space to get in — Rob had recently set up a unicycle obstacle course in our yard because he’d noticed that when Quinn rode the unicycle it required so much focus that his OCD bully couldn’t mess with him.
It also helped to have Stephan visiting: Quinn had always loved him like an uncle. Stephan and I had been friends since we’d met at teachers’ college years earlier. I’d told Stephan about Quinn’s OCD in emails, but somehow I had gotten the feeling that he thought I was exaggerating. How could someone as stable, calm, and drama-free as Quinn ever acquire such a thing?
It didn’t take long for Stephan to see I wasn’t exaggerating. After half an hour on the trail, we realized that Quinn had fallen behind. “That’s weird,” said Stephan. “Since when does this ever happen? What’s he doing back there?”
“I hate to think,” I said. “I’ll go check.” When I rode back I could see Quinn just standing there on the trail beside his bike, not moving.
“Are you having trouble, Quinn? We’ll be at Brown Lake soon. Let’s keep going.”
He gave me a distressed look but got on his bike anyway. He pedalled for about twenty seconds before getting off again. “I have to go back the same way I came,” he suddenly blurted out.
“No, you don’t,” I called back. “That’s the OCD bully telling you that. He wants to ruin your day. Boss him back! Tell him you’re going to Brown Lake with your mother and Stephan!”
He got back on his bike and tried again, pedalling a little longer this time. Then I heard a crash. I turned around and saw that Quinn had thrown his bike into a bush. He was standing with his arms crossed and a fierce look of loathing on his face. “I hate this!” he shrieked. “I fucking hate this! I wish I was dead!”
“What’s going on?” said Stephan. He’d ridden back when he’d heard the commotion and was now watching Quinn. For the briefest of moments I caught a glimmer of unmasked fear on Stephan’s face, then it was gone. “I can’t wait to plunge into Brown Lake. How about you, Quinn?”
Quinn’s bike was still in the bush. “Stephan is crazy, isn’t he, Quinn? Swimming in October? Do you think he’ll really do it?”
“Laurie, I’ve gone swimming in October at Brown Lake before. I’d do it in November if someone paid me a hundred dollars. What about you, Quinn? How much would someone have to pay you to swim in November?”
Quinn appeared to be thinking about this. I could see the struggle on his face, and his wanting desperately to keep riding his bike with us, while the OCD monster was demanding he go back the way he came, to erase the fun he’d had so far.
“Brown Lake! Let’s go!” I suddenly shouted. I motioned for Stephan to get going. Stephan and I would ride to the lake no matter what. We weren’t going to enable the OCD bully and go back the way we’d come. Quinn would have to make the choice himself. He’d have to see how much OCD was wrecking his life.
Even if I hadn’t read that this was actually what we were supposed to be doing — refusing to enable the OCD — I knew down into my bone marrow it was the right thing to do. Still, it felt cruel. What mother leaves her child alone in the woods? Even if he was ten and perfectly capable of riding back to Wakefield on his own by the same trail — and I knew he’d take the exact same trail since the whole point was to backtrack — I was a little panicked. I thought he’d fol
low us but wasn’t totally sure.
Stephan and I kept riding toward the lake. After a few minutes he stopped on the trail to say, “Jesus, Laurie, I’m sorry. I didn’t really believe you about this. He’s like a completely different kid. That’s not the Quinn I know at all. That really scared me back there.”
“It scares me every day.” Neither of us spoke for a while. I was trying to remember that other Quinn, the one Stephan remembered. I recalled how funny Quinn used to be, how he liked talking in British accents, pretending when he set the table to be the snobby butler on Downton Abbey, or using a cockney accent to discuss various race cars or cars he’d see on the street. Blimey, that’s a beater innit?
“Hey, look!” said Stephan. “He’s coming.”
I turned around and saw the red splash of Quinn’s shirt soaring at us through the jack pines. I took in a deep thankful breath.
“Yippee, Quinn! You did it! Way to go!” I shouted.
Quinn flashed me the briefest of smiles and passed us on the trail. My heart leapt like a gazelle that the day could continue and he’d fought back the bully. Soon, we arrived at the place where we always leave our bikes propped against some hemlocks before heading down to the lake. We live in a mixed northern forest and sometimes we’d come across stone walls, cellar holes, and evidence of previous habitations — old apple orchards, for instance — right in the middle of the woods or meadows, places where a few generations of hardy immigrants toiled to clear the land and farm only to eventually admit defeat and abandon the enterprise. To get to Brown Lake after we park our bikes, we always walk down some crumbling stone steps that I imagine some Irish farmer built over a century ago.