Hope and Other Luxuries: A Mother's Life With a Daughter's Anorexia

by Clare B. Dunkle

  So I made myself choose a magazine. And I waited.

  I waited for fifteen minutes!

  Okay, this wasn’t reasonable. This was downright insane! I crossed to the intercom again.

  “Hello?” asked yet another voice. It sounded surprised. “The reason for your visit?”

  “I’d like to leave the waiting room now,” I said with some force.

  “Of course!” replied the voice, sounding even more surprised. Why didn’t you tell us sooner? You crazy woman!

  And the outer door buzzed open at last.

  I was halfway back to the hotel, walking very fast and out of breath, before I could calm myself down enough to think straight.

  Drew Center was failing to impress me—that’s exactly what it was doing. Yes, there had been a friendly and normal interaction every now and then, but from the psychiatrist who hadn’t bothered to look at Elena’s file to the staff who couldn’t bother to open the front door, the majority seemed disinterested and unprofessional.

  Not only that, but I couldn’t help comparing my fifteen-minute ordeal with what my poor daughter must be going through.

  Elena had been locked in against her will for weeks now, labeled with a disorder that might be nothing more than the figment of a brutal quack’s imagination. In her entire life, I had never seen her looking less healthy or more stressed, and she was back to having those mysterious blackouts again. Without anybody justifying such a serious step or even taking a position one way or the other, she had become an inmate in a psychiatric institution where she might not even belong.

  It was horrifying, that’s what it was. It was horrifying!

  Your daughter is completely normal, Dr. Eichbaum had told me. But what happened when a normal person got locked up in an institution and treated as if she weren’t normal? It added up to nothing less than serious psychological trauma. No wonder Elena kept blacking out!

  When I got back to the hotel room, I called the only psychiatrist in the entire United States with whom I had ever felt a connection. That was Dr. Harris, the Texas doctor who had worked with Valerie before she had run away. Not only was he an expert in adolescent and young adult psychiatry, but he specialized in eating disorders, too. I was pretty sure that I remembered him telling me that he even ran an eating disorder center for a while.

  I wasn’t expecting very much when I placed the call. It was more of a shot in the dark than anything. But amazingly enough, Dr. Harris took the time to talk to me. I found myself babbling out the whole story, and Dr. Harris didn’t hurry me or cut me off. His voice on the phone, patient and engaged, helped me to get through the painful details without breaking down or leaving out anything important.

  “I can see why you’re worried,” he said when I came to the end of my tale. “It sounds like each doctor is just passing her on. It may be that no one has taken the time to do the proper tests to see if she really does have anorexia nervosa.”

  Relief washed over me. “So there are proper tests!”

  “Oh, yes. Patient history, physical condition, lists of questions, medical tests. It can take several hours to do a full assessment. And have they done a twenty-four-hour EEG on her yet?”

  “No. I know they did a CT scan, and I think they did a short EEG one afternoon.”

  “It would be a good idea to do a brain MRI and a twenty-four-hour EEG,” he said, “just to rule out the possibility of anything neurological causing the blackouts. And a full psychiatric assessment to find out if your daughter does have anorexia nervosa, and also whether there are other psychological conditions comorbid—that is, present along with it.”

  Outside my hotel room, dusk was settling in, but I felt as if the clouds had just rolled back to reveal the sun and a chorus of angels was singing Hallelujah. “If I bring her to Texas, will you see her?” I asked. “Will you arrange for those tests?”

  “You’re a long way away,” he pointed out.

  “I’ll rent a car,” I said. “We can be there in two days. We have to get a handle on this!”

  “Two days. Friday. Let me check with the secretary and see what my schedule looks like.” There was a pause. “Yes, I can see her on Friday afternoon.”

  Full of excitement, I called Drew Center and told Elena the plan. Then I asked to speak to Dr. Moore. This time, when I spoke to him, he didn’t sound so complacent.

  “She was transferred into my care,” he said. “We had to clear a bed for her, and you agreed to it.”

  “That was before she had another one of these fainting episodes and wound up in the emergency room again,” I countered. And before you couldn’t get around to diagnosing her for a whole week, I thought.

  “We are working with your daughter, Mrs. Dunkle,” he said. “We have her best interests in mind.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “I never doubted it. But the fact is that Drew Center turned her down in the beginning because she probably shouldn’t even be there. I want to get her the neurological tests and the psychiatric evaluation she should have had before she even came to you.”

  “That’s our job,” he said, and now he sounded even more annoyed. “If Elena needs evaluation, we’ll evaluate her. By law, I can hold her for seventy-two hours. She’s in my care, and that’s what I’m doing.”

  This caught me completely off guard. It wasn’t as if I were trying to take Elena out of Drew Center in order to deny her proper care. It had never even occurred to me that I might be refused the right to choose the medical care for my own child.

  Very upset, I called Dr. Harris again. But he soon calmed me down.

  “I’m sure the Drew Center psychiatrist is just concerned that you may be removing Elena from treatment altogether,” he said. “But I’ve worked with Drew Center on several occasions. They’ve seen several of my clients. I’ll call and explain that they’ll be releasing Elena into my care. That should clear it up.”

  Thank God for one rational psychiatrist, at least!

  I hung up the phone and started looking at maps on the Internet. Once again, my mind was churning with plans. Motels . . . Routes . . . Rental cars . . . Aren’t there websites that will let me compare all the rental car companies at once?

  The phone rang and pulled me away from my plans and searches. Dr. Harris was on the other end of the line again. This time, he sounded puzzled, and even a little sheepish.

  He said, “They won’t release Elena to me, either.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  When I heard him say that—when I realized that my daughter had to stay locked up in a mental institution where she very likely didn’t belong—what I felt was beyond horror. To know that my beloved child, who trusted me, was being held prisoner and that it was my signature on a form that had put her there . . .

  My imagination immediately dredged up all the most ghastly images that anxiety and guilt could conjure and played them all for me in one long, gruesome ordeal. Outside was a honey-colored sunset and the long, inconspicuous process of twilight, but none of the mundane things I saw around me seemed to match what I was going through in my head. It was as if I were watching a movie about my hotel room while actually being somewhere else, somewhere very dark and scary that I couldn’t escape. And in that dark, scary place was this movie of a lit-up hotel room, playing on a little computer monitor in the corner.

  Gray dusk congealed into black night. All the lights were on in that little hotel room on the monitor. But they couldn’t light up the dark, scary place I was in.

  It isn’t that I stopped thinking. If anything, my thoughts spun too quickly. I was worrying, and I was regretting, but strangely enough, I wasn’t thinking about Elena. All I could think of was Kate, my Jane Austen girl from Marak’s goblin kingdom. She ended up locked in the caves underground, and for a very long time, she hated it there. She would go to the doors and argue and beg to be let out.

  Now, as I staggered around in that dark, scary place, I could hardly bear to think of what I had made Kate suffer. How could I have done
that? I thought. How could I have been so cruel? And I found myself obsessing over how I could reach her—how I could apologize to my character for what I had put her through.

  “What?” asked a voice. “They won’t do what?”

  I was crying on the phone to someone. It was Joe. I could hear his voice. It sounded very far away, as if I had set the phone down somewhere. But at the same time, another part of me couldn’t absorb that I was talking to a person at all. It was if I were bawling away to the phone itself, and nobody was listening.

  Nobody was there with me. I was alone. I was all alone, next to the phone, and I had the most horrible headache of my life.

  People say, She’s got a gear loose. When my family was together, I was the central gear. My husband came to me for things, and my daughters came to me for things. I paid bills, I made calls, I filled out forms and permission slips, I bought clothes, I cooked meals, I planned birthdays, and I booked vacations. The other members thought about themselves and each other, but I’m the one who thought about the whole family.

  Then trouble came. We went into the bad years. The harder it got for my family, the more they counted on me to keep everything going. The more trouble the other gears in my family had, the more I pushed against them to keep us all on track. I was turning, turning with all my might, turning for all of us, because when Joe was working twelve-hour days and Valerie was covered in burns and Elena was thrashing around, out of her mind, I couldn’t be out of my mind, too, could I?

  So I turned. I struggled to turn. It took all I had to turn: to ask the right questions, to pack the suitcases, to stay by the hospital bed, to be the advocate for my family. And then, just when it had reached the point that I was pushing with all my strength—poof! No more gears were meshed with mine.

  In that hotel room, I was one lone gear, whipping around like crazy. I was staggering around in a dark, lonely place that wasn’t the real world anymore, while little images of physical life played out on a tiny computer screen nearby. And dear God—how my head hurt! It hurt like crazy!

  Then there was a click at the door, and there stood Joe.

  I had known once upon a time that he was coming, but when I saw him, it was as if I’d had no idea. Joe walked through the door like a flesh-and-blood miracle, and with him came normal life, and minutes and hours, and the hotel room around me again, with afternoon sunlight pouring through all the windows.

  I collapsed into his arms and bawled my headache away. Within five minutes, I was myself again.

  Joe had rented a car. He was hungry, so he drove us out to find a burger place. He ordered for us, and the miserable little burger he handed me, with one pickle and a teaspoon of chopped onions on it, tasted absolutely amazing.

  While we ate, I told him everything that had happened. I told him about the matched set of psychiatrists at the children’s hospital who had politely ignored all my questions. I told him about Dr. Harris’s calm, interested approach and Dr. Moore’s inexplicably hostile one.

  “Maybe you got on his bad side somehow,” Joe said.

  “Maybe I did,” I said. “I’m certainly not on his good side.”

  “I’ll see if he’ll meet with me,” Joe said. “If he feels so strongly that Elena needs to stay at Drew Center, maybe I can get him to talk to me about it. I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

  When we got back to the room, Joe tried to follow through on this. He got on the phone and asked for an appointment with Dr. Moore. But no, that would be impossible, he was told. Dr. Moore didn’t have time to meet with him.

  “Okay,” Joe said. “Well, could you please ask him to call me back, then?”

  No, came the answer: Dr. Moore didn’t have time to do that, either.

  “Oh,” said Joe. “Well . . . thank you for trying.”

  He hung up and looked at me.

  “I’m going to hope,” he said, “that Dr. Moore is really, really busy. Let’s just assume that. And while we’re assuming that, let’s go get some coffee, too.”

  So Joe and I walked to the nearby shopping mall, sat in the food court, and talked about our plans. Dr. Harris in Texas had moved Elena’s appointments to the next week. Tomorrow, we would pick her up from Drew Center and start driving.

  Dr. Harris’s office was over fifteen hundred miles away. That should have seemed daunting. Actually, I couldn’t wait.

  “Should we book a hotel room?” Joe asked.

  “Nope, let’s just drive till we get tired. I’m ready to have a little less structure in my life.”

  At six forty-five that evening, we headed to Drew Center for visiting hour, ready to see our captive daughter. Joe hadn’t seen Elena in over two weeks. Fifteen or so relatives and friends of patients had gathered in the little waiting room with us. At least this time, I didn’t have to be locked in by myself.

  At seven o’clock, the door to the center buzzed open, and a staff member appeared with a clipboard.

  “Edgerton,” she read out loud. “Towney. Dunkle. Your family member is not allowed to have visitors. The rest of you, proceed past me to bag check.” And the other visitors filed inside.

  One of the mothers whose name she had read started to cry. I wondered if she, too, hadn’t seen her child in weeks. I wondered if she had traveled a long way to see her child, and if Dr. Moore was keeping that patient by force, too.

  “Why can’t we see Elena?” Joe asked the nurse. “What did she do?”

  “She didn’t gain weight today.”

  “What rule did she break?” Joe asked.

  “She didn’t break any rules.”

  “Then she didn’t eat everything?” he wanted to know.

  “No, she was fully compliant.”

  I didn’t know how Joe felt about this, but I started shaking. I was literally shaking with rage.

  “So, let me get this straight,” I said. “Our daughter did everything you asked her to do. You’re punishing her for something that’s out of her control.”

  The nurse set her jaw. “Weight matters.”

  Now I could see that Joe, too, was barely hanging on to his temper. “Then why didn’t you feed her more?” he demanded. “You’re punishing her for doing everything you asked, and I’m not going to stand for it. I am going to see my daughter!”

  The mother who had been crying was still standing next to us. She said, “And we’re going to see our daughter, too!”

  The nurse gave an exasperated sigh, and I could feel it again: that sense of hostility and distrust. It had crackled through Dr. Petras’s stern voice and angry threats, and it had hummed behind the bland comments of Dr. Moore. It had even been present when I was talking to the set of three psychiatrists, hidden though it was under polite serenity.

  Hostility breeds hostility. Now it was mutual.

  “I have to check,” the nurse muttered. A minute later, she came back. “Oh, come on, then,” she grumbled. And we joined the rest of the visitors.

  Next morning, Joe and I packed the trunk of our tiny hatchback rental car and drove over to pick up Elena. We spent a tense twenty minutes parked under the big shade trees of the college campus that wasn’t a college campus at all—the stately redbrick University of the Mentally Ill. Then Elena burst out the front door, lugging her suitcase.

  “So, did Dr. Moore tell you good luck?” I asked.

  “It was kind of weird,” she said. “It wasn’t him. It was another guy, an older guy who looked nice. He asked me where I was going, and I told him we were going to see Dr. Harris in Texas, and he said we’ll like Dr. Harris, he’s a great psychiatrist.

  “So I said Dr. Moore didn’t seem to think so, because he wouldn’t let me leave, and the old guy snorted and said, ‘I bet he threatened that you’d be leaving against medical advice, too, didn’t he?’ And he left that box unchecked. See?”

  Elena produced her discharge paper. Sure enough, the Against Medical Advice box was unchecked.

  That put the crowning touch on my happiness. After all the frustration
and hostility I’d faced, those friendly words about Dr. Harris and the scornful ones about Dr. Moore seemed like a vote in my favor. I had made the right decision. We were doing the right thing.

  Joe took the on-ramp to the highway, and our car picked up speed, and my spirits soared as they hadn’t soared in months.

  My family was with me, gathered together again despite almost insurmountable obstacles. Valerie wasn’t here physically, but she’d been writing me more and more often, and I felt that she was safe and content and connected, too. The dark time was over—the dark, imprisoned time. I had rescued my daughter. I had rescued us all.

  Outside my window was bright sunshine, and inside my mind was bright sunshine, and between the inside and the outside, I felt like a flake of transparent crystal. I felt as if the clean, fresh light was shining straight into my soul and striking rainbows that stretched to the horizon.

  “That doctor was really nice,” Elena said in a low voice, almost to herself. “I kind of wish . . . I wish maybe I’d stayed.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  This odd comment puzzled me for a while. Elena couldn’t seem to explain it, and I couldn’t work it out into anything that made sense. But I was so grateful to have my family together again that nothing could bring me down for long. I sang along to the new CDs I’d bought at the shopping mall, and the heartfelt smiles I saw on the faces of gas station employees and convenience store cashiers that afternoon must have been a reflection of my own.

  We stopped whenever and wherever we wanted to stop, and when we pulled off the highway for the night, the little countryside motel seemed particularly charming. We all crowded onto one bed to sit and watch the old-fashioned boxy television, and the six channels it pulled in seemed to be loaded with hilarious shows designed especially for our amusement. I listened to Joe and Elena laugh together, and my heart brimmed with happiness.

  But by the next morning, I was already feeling anxious again.

  Something was different about Elena. She could still laugh, but her laughter no longer felt spontaneous. A part of her was shut off, and she was watching over it. I knew Elena could be careful with people outside the family, even with the ones she considered friends. But I hadn’t felt this kind of reserve toward Joe and me before.