I stumbled. “What if I say no?”
“Then it’s highly unlikely the mediator will approve her petition.”
I said no.
My own daughter could not come home. I woke up at night and each morning, sure I’d dreamed all of this. No? It’s real? The walls of our bedroom were still pale yellow, the trim white, and Lisa was still in the hospital. I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep, but if I didn’t get out of bed, maybe nothing bad would happen. Or it would happen without my participation. I could stay in bed and not answer the phone until I became like the Jennifer Connelly character in the movie House of Sand and Fog. She stops paying the bills, stops taking care of everything, and holes up in the house that is no longer hers. Like Lisa, she has no other place to go.
When did these cotton sheets turned to lead? I couldn’t move. Sweating, I waited for a sign, something to tell me it really would be better if I got out of bed, but on that day, like day before, there was no sign.
The only shopping we did was for food, and Ned did most of that. If we went to a movie and ran into someone we knew, we’d stonewall. Well-meaning questions struck me as judgmental. I didn’t want to hear about other people’s children, or that a friend of a friend’s child had trouble with eating disorders and they could get the name of the place she went for treatment. My left ear ached from being plastered to the phone. Sometimes I would remind myself to use my right ear, but if I had to write something down, that didn’t work. I stopped answering the phone or returning calls for several weeks.
Ned and I scrabbled around for words that would sound like improvement. “Yes, she is a little better today.” “She has a lot more energy today.” Or, “Not as good as yesterday, but you know, two steps forward, one step back.” We said “better” so many times, it became an anvil chorus in my head. “Better better better better better better,” like the end of “Hey Jude.”
The psych ward is on the second floor, near where the maternity ward was when I had Lisa. The last time we were in this hospital, Lisa was eighteen months old, having tubes put into her ears so she wouldn’t get so many infections. The other child in the room had leukemia. We felt very lucky.
Stairs are quickest, but the stairwell often smells of urine. The elevator is for wheelchairs. The escalator is the best way. It feels like a department store. You can forget for thirty seconds that you’re not on the way to the lingerie section.
One week after Lisa was admitted, I arrived for the midday visiting hours to find that visiting hours were now only 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., and that surely we had been informed. Maybe we had.
Lisa was so thin, she often used a wheelchair, and she was threatened with tube-feeding if she didn’t gain a few ounces. Roommates and other patients came and went. One of them, a graduate student, came back to visit and told Lisa she looked better. “When people tell me that, it makes me feel worse,” Lisa told her.
It also seemed to make Lisa feel worse when other patients commented on what a nice family she had, coming to see her every day, how lucky she was to have parents who obviously loved her.
At the time, Lisa took this to mean that, with support like us, being sick must be her own fault. She interpreted any encouraging comments as, “This isn’t cancer, Lisa. Stop feeling sorry for yourself!”
Doctors said they wanted her to stay until she was well enough not to come back. Her diagnosis, in addition to anorexia and bulimia, was major depression with psychotic features. Not that the TV was talking to her. Psychotic features were defined as “excessive worries that don’t respond to assurances, or fixed false beliefs.” One recurrent theme was that she was committing insurance fraud, being in the hospital when she shouldn’t be there, and that the police would be coming to arrest her. Later, her therapist explained the logic of this, because in Lisa’s mind she wasn’t sick enough to be hospitalized. Another psychotic feature was: “Holds self to impossible standard.” She was convinced she was the worst patient ever. “I’m not following my treatment program” and “I messed up,” she repeated without end.
After six weeks, we were suddenly informed that Lisa was being discharged in a few days. What? She could hardly walk and was still hauntingly thin. We only knew that if at all possible, she had to get out of the hospital. The department’s helpful social worker lined up an interview with the director of La Casa, a residential treatment facility in the community since 1979. Only eight to twelve people live there at any one time. It reminded me of a great old house in Berkeley I used to live in, cozy living room with overstuffed couches, a big dining table, young adults milling around. La Casa had therapists, medical supervision, house meetings, and chores, including cooking dinner, and an offsite day program to work on reentry skills. Ned and I were thrilled to learn such a program existed, and that Lisa could leave the hospital and be safe there. Previously, our knowledge of halfway houses was as charities or mentions in a crime report: Someone from a halfway house was beaten up while walking downtown.
Lisa stayed two nights at La Casa, but her medications made her tremble uncontrollably, and then she got so scared that she called 911 and told the dispatcher, “I think I just killed myself.” She was having what doctors called a dissociative episode, a sort of out-of-body panic attack. Sirens blaring, the police came and took her, handcuffed, back to the emergency room.
When I was allowed in, there was a security guard posted at her room but the handcuffs had been removed. Because of the suicide threat, a security guard would be there the whole time. Lisa was more cogent, though, and even smiled when I arrived. A real smile, appropriately sorrowful. She talked about “goofing up” this time—not her whole life, not “I’m the worst person in the world.” Could something have clicked? For a few hours Lisa shared a room with a severely anorexic young woman, immersed in her laptop and being extremely snotty to her mother. She knew the staff, and she displayed deep knowledge about eating disorders, electrolyte imbalance, and irregular pulse. She repeatedly mentioned her potassium levels. Lisa and I were able to watch this display at a remove, which gave me hope, even though Lisa was back in the hospital. Scott came to the ER, but only one of us could visit at a time. Their relationship was unraveling. Embarrassed, Lisa wanted him to go home. Ned and Jake were away for the weekend, using the Portland tickets and hotel that Ned had canceled for Lisa’s emergency in June, but I wasn’t left alone. My cousin Peggy came to the hospital with her sweet Labrador retriever.
On a Saturday night, the ER was so crowded that patients were sleeping in the hall. The psychiatric ward, too, was fully booked. One of the half-dozen young doctors we saw that day told me Lisa was going to be transferred to another hospital. Where? Oh, don’t worry, it’ll be somewhere in the Bay Area. That could be two hours away. Could this day get any worse?
At 11:00 p.m. Lisa’s bed was wheeled to the trauma room, which in contrast to the rest of the ER was empty and quiet. Lisa and her security detail spent the night there. When I arrived in the morning, the guard told me that the trauma room had been quiet, and Lisa had slept well. And Lisa had good news—she wouldn’t have to travel after all. There was a bed at Stanford. The place none of us had ever wanted to see again now looked good, even the heavy automatically locking double-door entrance.
Lisa got out in two days, stayed at La Casa for four months, and made at least one lasting friendship. But for another year, Lisa couldn’t get any traction in her life. Again, everything we did had a bad outcome, except for finding a psychologist, at last, who clicked with Lisa and had experience with ED patients. Lisa started to get some perspective, making two steps forward, one back, or the other way around, but she was moving.
lisa: I felt like I had lost everything: my job, apartment, school, friends, the man who loved me and I loved. Didn’t somebody have to pay for this? Maybe that is why, after leaving La Casa and moving back with my parents, I still threw up and hurt myself. I couldn’t quite express my true feelings to others.
That can also be why I took money from my paren
ts without asking and drove off to San Diego or Santa Cruz without telling anyone. Maybe I felt like I didn’t owe them an explanation and I still felt like shouting, “Fuck you for going to Europe when you knew I was sick!”
Instead, I popped a blood vessel again. Third time in one week. My hazel eyes were camouflaged by a piercing red dot. It was unattractive; as I stared in the mirror, it stared back. The visible repercussion of me being bad. People asked what happened, and I lied and said that I had allergies or got poked in the eye. I couldn’t tell them the truth, and I didn’t think anyone really cared to hear it. But maybe somebody knew. Perhaps Mom or Dad heard the faint murmur of me gasping for air as I gagged and choked and thought, “She’s doing it again.” Or they found evidence in the bathroom or had first noticed a certain food missing, such as buttery croissants intended for Sunday brunch or the Mitchell’s creamy vanilla ice cream that they all too easily controlled each night, dished out in tiny bowls that could never be enough for me. I had been so bad in my behavior that I had to punish myself severely.
I know how to make myself suffer and I know how to make myself just want to raise my arms in the air and shout, “I give up! Let me go!” So many times I have tried to leave behind my badness for a life more ordinary and less complicated. I might make it a few days, weeks, or months and feel proud that I might taste normalcy again. But the desire to fuck up always crept up on me and even when I wanted to push it away like a child pushing away vegetables at dinner, I caved. I needed the guilty pleasure of stuffing myself full of forbidden foods in a numbing trance, knowing that I was going to rid myself of that awful binge soon. I needed that rush of adrenaline from purging my food. I needed the pleasure in knowing I wouldn’t gain weight because I faked eating.
I got used to the bruised and cut fingers, swollen cheeks, protruding stomach, and red, watery eyes. In the hospital all I thought about was sneaking past a nurse into my bathroom after each meal and vomiting until I saw stomach bile like I used to. But no, I followed the rules, all the while knowing I was an incredibly bad person and the worst patient of all time. I tried to convince others and they didn’t buy it; they wanted me to gain ten pounds in the hospital. Instead, by carefully counting calories, I got admitted at ninety-eight pounds and discharged at ninety-three.
Then, all I wanted to do was eat. Not that I ever felt hungry or full. I never felt anything in my stomach, more like I had a head and legs and arms but no middle. I became a shell of a being who seemed to respond to some vocal advancements and could semi-carry a conversation and seemed to be getting better, when really I just felt numb. Soon, I was back in the bathroom.
sheila: After a breakdown in the spring, a hospital stay in the summer, and a halfway house in the fall and some of winter, Lisa was holed up at home and began edging back into the world again. She started seeing friends from high school. At last, she felt comfortable driving, a relief to me because she could do errands and get to appointments. And then she took the car and disappeared.
Occasionally she answered our pleading emails, and once she picked up her phone when I called. Twice she came home and then disappeared again. Should I have taken the car keys? Of course. What about putting a clamp on her ankle? Or kicking her out of the house?
But she wasn’t just being defiant. We knew she’d stopped taking her antidepressant and that she wasn’t sleeping. One friend had seen her, had initially let her stay, and then told Lisa she really needed to go home. Lisa cut her off, too.
We called the police and seriously considered reporting the car stolen. Until we realized it could involve guns. Officers in Palo Alto and Santa Cruz called Lisa’s cell phone, and she answered and sounded reasonable. One set up a meeting, which she blew off. The Santa Cruz police had a BOL (Be on Lookout) for her and the car. But even as we panicked, we realized that in a college town with a colorfully radical reputation, another runaway student was not a law-enforcement priority. Especially because she was an adult. As anyone knows who ventures into any major American city’s downtown, a person can’t be taken away for having disorderly thoughts.
That’s why we seriously thought about abducting our daughter. Lisa was hitting the Santa Cruz bar scene, and we knew some of the bars. If only we could find her, though, she would see the love on our faces, come home, get a good night’s sleep, and go see her therapist in the morning. We would all cuddle again as our Good Night Moon family. I even mentioned this plan to a police officer. He talked to me as if I were sane, reminding me that kidnapping was a felony and probably would only push her to run farther away next time. Still, we had to do something. It was as if she’d been kidnapped and we were bargaining with criminals: Please, let her be alive, let her come home, we’ll do anything just to hear her voice.
I thought to call John Hubner, a colleague from the Mercury News who has deep experience with juvenile justice, courts, and cops. John’s first job was as a probation officer in Chicago, in one of the busiest corrections systems in the country. He and Jill Wolfson wrote a well-regarded book, Somebody Else’s Children: The Courts, the Kids, and the Struggle to Save America’s Troubled Families . John lives in Santa Cruz, though I didn’t know where or if he was even still around. We hadn’t spoken in six months.
I called at 5:00 p.m. and gave him an hour’s worth of the Lisa saga. He talked me out of arrest and kidnap, and got to the core question: Is this behavior or biochemistry? Since it wasn’t just bad behavior, but real sickness, the options were complicated.
John knew every bar I mentioned. These were upscale places, on a circuit traveled by young couples and singles from UC Santa Cruz. These are “drinking and talking” places, he reassured me. The police reporter in him had to notice that in running away Lisa had chosen Santa Cruz, not San Francisco or Los Angeles or any other big city where she could more easily hide. Her memories of Santa Cruz, especially in the last months, had been awful. To us, that was puzzling, worrisome self-punishment. John saw something else.
I described Lisa, and John had an idea of what she looked like. A couple of years earlier he had gone to O’Neill, where she worked, and introduced himself as my friend. That day, Lisa remembered him from newspaper events. Lisa’s memory for people has always been astonishing. Supplied with her car’s license number and details, and the address of a recent parking ticket, John found the car within thirty minutes. It still had a “Mercury News Employee” sticker in the front window.
Now what? Leaving a note might scare her off. John reported that the car was parked properly, within the lines, a detail that somehow mattered. There was a popular café near the parking lot. He went in and saw a young woman that could be Lisa, with a guy, but John was doubtful. Does Lisa drink coffee? Yeah, but who doesn’t. Then he went to one of the bars and saw another suspect, slouching. Does Lisa slouch? Again, not a distinguishing clue. In the third place, John recognized Lisa sitting at the bar with a nice-looking guy. He sat down next to her, ordered a beer, and struck up a conversation:
“Want to make a bet?”
“Uh, okay.”
“I bet your name’s Lisa.”
John has a soft, nonthreatening voice, employed over many years as a reporter in getting reluctant people to tell him their deepest feelings. He doesn’t look crazy and he wasn’t hitting on her, though she later told us she wondered why some old guy had sat down next to her. Once he started talking, Lisa’s people memory ignited. She recalled that John lived in Santa Cruz and had come into O’Neill, and that he and I had worked together for years. All very cordial. Then she turned away, back to her companion.
John handed her his cell phone and said, “Call your parents. They just need to know you’re safe.”
And she did. Lisa sounded good, said she would call, said she would go to her therapy appointment the next day.
In some ways, it didn’t matter. All we needed was to hear her voice, to know she was alive, and to get John’s description of their conversation. He made her keep talking to him.
As he told us, �
�I’m looking hard at her, into her eyes. She looks really healthy, relaxed, and happy.”
Of course, it was early in the evening. The drinking was young.
John got to her story, though. As she told us, loud and often, she hated being back home in shallow Palo Alto. But unlike us, John sympathized and talked up Santa Cruz as a more stimulating place for a young person.
“Sounds like this is a walk on the wild side for you, but in a safe place?”
“Yeah,” she told him. “I could’ve gone to Compton!”
Before leaving, John threw Lisa a safety net. “If you ever need a place to crash, please, knock on my door. Here, take down my address.”
She got up and went behind the hostess stand for crayons and a napkin. She’d been to this bar before.
A month later, even Lisa was laughing about her incident with the Sam Spade of Santa Cruz. A little time, distance, and humor don’t make eating disorders go away, but they offer reasons to believe.
One morning I picked up the phone to hear: “This is a non-emergency call from the Palo Alto Police Department.” Still, this was a live person calling, not a recording, so it wasn’t about flushing the sewers or the May Fête Parade. My mind basically stopped until the officer continued.
Ned had taken the train to work, ran late, and apparently hadn’t paid attention to where he parked his car. It was blocking someone’s driveway. If I could come get it now, they wouldn’t tow it away.
No problem!
fifteen
The Trouble with Experts
Sometimes you have to remind yourself—and it’s not your first thought when your child is in pain—that professional health providers also have mouths to feed. They may be kind, understanding, generous, highly skilled, even brilliant. People who choose to work with eating disorders, which are notoriously difficult to treat and have high fatality rates, often have the noblest intentions. But like most of us, they work for a living. They are professionals.
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