The next person to see me made a dramatic entrance. First, she had gotten a head start on her crying in the waiting room. But more than the sound of her crying and sobbing, she could barely make it through the waiting room door. I am no good at guessing someone’s weight. She later admitted to being 380 pounds. I took her word, as our clinic’s scale only went to 300. Her general appearance was that she was swollen with water – a human sponge. The edema bloated every part of her body, and her crying eyes were nearly swollen shut. I started by asking her when her problems began. She was now 42, and said she had thought everything was okay until age 15, when she had been raped by a “friend of the family.” This man was not really a friend, he was a person who went to the same church. Moreover, he was a Sunday school teacher. You would think that by now everyone would know that being a Sunday school teacher does not make someone a saint. But this family had not yet figured it out. In many such cases, this type of person is shielded by the religious community, and even the victim’s parents are often in denial. This woman was lucky. Her parents told her that they were going to prosecute this sinner to the extent of the law.
There was a trial, and she had testified. She thought everything had turned out great, and so did her parents. The rapist was convicted and sent to jail. Again, those who are experienced in these things know that this type of trauma is never over quite so easily. The woman went on with her life and ended up in a really abusive relationship — the kind where someone locks you up and won’t let you leave the house and beats you if you look out the window. By the time she got the courage to escape this living hell and seek a shelter, had a peck of kids. They lived in this shelter for over a year before she found that she had what it takes to start over. She went to school, gained some clerical skills, and started over. She was actually doing pretty well until something happened that triggered a demon she didn’t know had possessed her. She was called for jury duty and went, with pride, wanting to do her civic duty. She couldn’t. She had a panic attack as soon as she entered the courtroom. She ran to the ladies’ room, threw up, and tried to enter the courtroom again – and it was even worse. People thought she was having a heart attack, and they sent an ambulance for her. I do not recommend this means of getting out of jury duty, although it sure worked for her. Read more on Murphy’s Law Of Medicine At Work…
Filed under depression, Diagnosis, Doctors, prescription drugs by on Aug 17th, 2011. Comment. 
The old guys were right.
I mean the really old guys, the ones who wrote over one hundred years ago. The guys like Freud and Janet who said that mostly everything that shapes people’s lives seems to be trauma — whether or not modern authors agree.
I have seen an anorectic whose trauma was a passer-by in a crowd who told her that she was too fat for anyone to have sex with, and then keep walking. I have seen a sufferer of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) who was told she was filthy when she was a kid. She later became so excited about cleanliness she missed nights of sleep to tidy the living room.
But although very real causes of pathology, these seem too trivial to be real traumas for most people.
Others are too horrible to be denied. Read more on PTSD From Sexual Trauma — Learning That Life Is Not Always Fair…
Filed under PTSD by on Jun 3rd, 2011. Comment.
I was commissioned a captain in the United States Army in a northern Midwest city. The physician who examined me before I took the oath was senior and experienced and as avuncular as they come.
He said the most interesting people (and far and away the smartest) he got to meet in his life were commissioned women. The one he had seen before me was a woman who had been a professional musician, a clarinetist I think, and was going straight to Wahington, D.C. to play in a dance band at the White House. He told me about women rocket scientists and others. Me, I figured I was only a doctor, a half-trained neurosurgeon. As a generalist he felt somehow he needed to show me enough respect. He really didn’t want to do a physical, so he did a cursory and discrete one, and I asked him about being a civilian physician attached to the military. In particular, I asked him about neurological and psychiatric screening. Although he told me he knew how to do a pretty detailed neurological examination, he said he never had to do one. Anyone with that kind of illness would, he thought, be likely to be screened out long before. After all, these were generally healthy young men. Basically, the most important part of the examination was checking them for hernias. Read more on Military Mental Health — A Contradiction?…
Filed under News by on Apr 6th, 2011. Comment.
She was 29 years old and so obese that she had to walk through the door to my office sideways. She had put on most of the weight, she said, after she had
been date-raped.
She did not remember much about what happened. She knew the guy who had been with her, and avoided him as best she could, although she still had thoughts of him, that intruded into either her nighttime dreams or her daytime thoughts. And she had the characteristic “hyper-arousal.” I have learned, the hard way, never to think of slamming the door or clapping my hands to test this one. I only did that once or twice and always regretted it. I just asked her if a sudden noise made her jump in the air, ever, and she nodded. “How did you know?” she asked. Read more on Roofies, Ruffies, or Mexican Valium: It Doesn’t Say “I Love You.”…
Filed under prescription drugs, Stimulants, Substance Abuse by on Oct 27th, 2010. 1 Comment.
Her teeth were mostly missing. I did not ask her to remove her ill-fitting wig, for I wanted her to keep whatever pride she had been able to preserve.Her face was worn, but her cheekbones proud and high.
Filed under prescription drugs by on May 17th, 2010. Comment.