🎧 Chapter Twenty-Six | The Doctor of the Year

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After one helpful stranger gives her the tools to solve her crazed-chicken problem, a second helpful stranger offers to help Jennifer through her difficulty healing from the car by inviting her to go “back to the beginning” about Rick. How did they meet? What was he treating her for?

(Note the tense change, writers, from present to past now, as Jennifer tells of her first visit to Rick’s office.)

Chapter Twenty-Six

The Doctor of the Year

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“Jennifer?” a voice called. “Jennifer Lauck?”

I looked up from the magazine in my hands, a back issue of The New Yorker.

There he stood. Dr. Rick. The director of the clinic and a tenured professor at the state school for natural healing.

Uncommonly tall, he cut a striking figure in his pristine white doctor’s jacket worn over a pale blue shirt and khaki’s belted at the waist.

I tossed The New Yorker to the side table. Stood. We shook hands. His were big. Cool. Dry.

Pleasantries exchanged—“How are you doing?” and “Nice to meet you,” Dr. Rick led me through the lobby and then down a narrow hallway. We passed closed door after closed door. 

“I see Tony is your referral,” Dr. Rick said over his shoulder while reading from a slip of paper affixed to the outside of a file. “Great student. One of my best. How do you know each other?”

“We met at a Buddhist retreat,” I said, adjusting my purse on my shoulder. “We study with the same teacher.”

Dr. Rick stopped, finally, and opened a door. “Please,” he said, waved me inside a cramped room with an elevated table, a counter with a sink, a stool, and a high-backed chair against a far wall.

“You know Tony graduates in the spring?” Dr. Rick says, coming in after me and closing the door. “He’s opening his own clinic.”

I took in the blood pressure cuff attached to a metal hanger on the wall. The red container in the corner with a sticker affixed to the front that read: “Danger! Sharps!” 

Dr. Rick tossed the file on the counter and turned on the faucet. He pumped liquid detergent into his palm. “Tony says Tibetan practice is intense,” Dr. Rick said over the running water. He washed his hands front and back. “He’s doing that thing…Ngondro? Is that what it’s called? Like four hours of meditation a day?”

“Yeah,” I said, eased into one of the upright chairs, held my purse on my lap—an oversized tapestry number filled with emergency supplies for the kids who were younger and needier back then. In the purse, I kept boxes of raisins, band-aids, baggies of fish crackers, antiseptic wipes. Legos. Crayons. Blank paper.

He turned the water off, tugged two paper towels from a dispenser.

“You’re doing that, too?” Dr. Rick asked, wiping his hands. “Ngondro?”

I studied him a long moment, a sense of reserve despite the fact he was called a rockstar in the field of healing trauma. Something about these questions and the chatter about Tony felt…odd. Familiar, almost intimate, as if we were pals.

“Yes,” I said, tone rather prim and sat taller in the chair. “I am, or I was. I finished.”

Dr. Rick tossed the damp paper towels into the can next to the counter. “That’s tough stuff. Prostrations and visualizations?”

He eased a rolling stool from under the exam table with his foot, dropped to sit, and wheeled closer.

“Not that hard,” I said, studied him before me now on that low stool, all knees and elbows. “Mostly time consuming.”

He stroked his beard thoughtfully. Through his wire framed glasses, he had cool blue eyes. “I’m more into Zen but Tibetan meditation practice is intriguing. You’ll have to tell me more sometime.”

Tell him more? Sometime? What does that mean?

I glanced at his left hand, not because I thought he was hitting on me but because that’s where my mind went in the presence of men like Dr. Rick. Accomplished, good looking, well-educated. He wore a battered gold ring on his left hand. Good, I thought, as if his being married meant I was safe.

“So?” Dr. Rick said. “What brings you here today?”

The easy going pal vanished and he was a different man. Like a blank page before me. Face expressionless. Eyes empty.

Something was off here but Tony said he was brilliant so…

Taking in a deep inhale, I glanced over at the container of discarded needles. “First of all,” I said, looking at him again. “I know you do acupuncture but I don’t want needles. Tony said you would figure something else out. Maybe herbs?”

Dr. Rick shifted his gaze to the sharps container, too, then back to me. “Do you have an aversion to needles?” he asked and in a way that seemed almost mocking.

“Hello? Doesn’t everyone?”

“Well, not really….”

“No needles,” I said. My “chop-chop” hand went up between us—the hand used with the kids when their bickering got out of hand.

Dr. Rick startled, then shifted slightly back on the stool.

“Sorry,” I said, lowered the chop-chop hand. “I just don’t want needles.”

He adjusted his glasses on his face. “Fair enough,” he said, tone cautious now.

An awkward silence yawned wide between us. I shifted my head from side to side, tried to reorient myself. “So, I have this thing….” I said but stopped. No. I didn’t have a thing. “About ten years ago,” I said, starting again. “I started writing these stories about myself to understand my past. You know, losses? Hardships?”

Dr. Rick now wore a listening smile, lips pressed together but otherwise remained still. The eyes empty again.

“Despite all this writing,” I continued, “plus some years in therapy—mostly talk but some hypno-regression, too—there’s one memory I cannot pull together.”

“Hypno-regression?” Dr. Rick asked, “like hypnosis?”

“More like deep relaxation to access repressed memories.”

“Ah. Okay. So, there is one memory…?” He rolled his hand, prompting me to go on.

“Exactly,” I said but shook my head. “No, I remember. I mean, I remember enough...” I stopped again because this was the messy part. Say too much, I’d go cold all over. Don’t say enough and he’ll likely pepper me with questions I don’t want to answer.

I studied my hands resting on my purse, cleared my throat. “Back when I was eight years old,” I said, looking at him again. “I went to a summer camp. There was this older guy. Like nineteen, maybe twenty. He was a swim instructor. Good looking, too.” I paused and waved this last bit aside. “Forget that. Not important. The point is I attended a summer camp for several weeks. Pretty early on, this guy picked me apart from the other kids. At first, he made an example of me because I couldn’t swim. He’d point me out to the others, say I was weak because I couldn’t swim but only dog paddled, you know that kind of thing.”

“How old were you again?” Dr. Rick asked.

“Eight,” I said.

He nodded as if making note of this mentally and then crossed his arms.

“Eventually, he started throwing me in the deep end of the pool, over and over. Classic bully stuff.”

Dr. Rick went very still at this point. His eyes shifted from blank to watchful. Curious. 

“After a while,” I said, “the other kids at the camp kind of shunned me, my brother among them, and pretty soon the guy started taking me to his room.” I stopped and looked hard at Dr. Rick. “His private room.”

He nodded ever so slightly as if to say yes, he understood.

The cold settled in. That chilled feeling in my gut. Keep going, I told myself. You can do this. Sitting taller, I rolled my shoulders back.

“I remember being taken away from the others but the rest isn’t clear and the reason I’m telling you this is because I get that something happened. Maybe a molestation. Maybe rape.” I paused and press my lips together. I hated that word. Hated the sound of it. Rape. “The point is,” I said, forcing myself to continue, “all this meditation I’m doing now—specifically the Ngondro that you asked about—might have nudged some parts of that memory forward.”

He quirked his head at this. “What do you mean, nudged?” he asked. 

“Well, when you meditate for a long time, the practice can churn things up…you know, from the past.”

“No,” he said. “I mean, what parts of the memory?”

“Oh,” I said, hugged my purse closer now because this was the worst part. The scariest part. And, it was the reason I was seeking help. “I’m tasting blood in my sinuses when I wake up in the morning. I’m hearing the voices of little kids laughing in my dreams. And, all day long, I’m feeling kind of…jagged.”

“Jagged?”

 I looked at the wall behind him, thinking how to explain. Then shifted my gaze to him again. This stranger. This genius.

“You remember when we were kids,” I asked, “and there were those steel thermoses with the glass inside?”

“I do,” he said. “My dad took his camping.”

“Yeah. They were heavy. Right? The outside was tough but the inside was fragile. If you dropped it….”

“…it would shatter,” Dr. Rick said. 

“That’s how I feel,” I said. “Tough on the outside. Broken inside.”

A long silence ticked between us then. From outside came the sound of a siren in the distance, the caw of a crow, the press of wind against the building. 

“Do you mind if I take notes?” Dr. Rick finally asked and motioned toward the counter.

“No. Go ahead.”

With a push, he rolled to the counter, grabbed the file, fished a pen from his jacket pocket, and then rolled back. The clatter of those metal wheels.  

I watched him write a series of notes in the file, then looked toward the one high window that was frosted, obscuring any view.

What I hadn’t mentioned was that the voices of children laughing started when I was nine-years-old. They’d lift at the strangest times, too, while I washed dishes, vacuumed, and later when I was older, when I drove a car. I felt sure I was going insane. In my late twenties, I went into talk therapy and finally the voices subsided. At that point, I started writing my memories, which became books. The voices, I thought, were done with me but now, they were back with a vengeance and permeating my senses, too.

Dr. Rick closed the file. Tucked his pen into his pocket. “What we have here is classic PTSD.”

“What?”

“Post-traumatic…”

“I know what PTSD means. I don’t have that. I’m not a veteran. I didn’t serve in a war.”

“Flashbacks are part of PTSD.”

“Flashbacks,” I said, laughed into a snort. “I’m not having flashbacks. It’s sensations and sounds.”

“Those are flashbacks.”

I laughed again, waved him off. “I don’t want to disrespect you but I cannot have PTSD. That’s a serious condition. People who have it don’t get better. They can manage symptoms, sure, but…”

Dr. Rick tossed my file onto the exam table next to him, crossed his arms again.

“Look, I know people who have PTSD. They are trapped in a past they can never escape. I don’t have that. I can’t have that. I’ve got kids.”

I don’t know why I fought his diagnosis. It was the reason I had come to this place, to this man. And, what did I know about any of this, other than reading a bit about the condition? I suppose it was the stigma of those letters: PTSD. Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder. The word disorder meant one thing to me: “Broken beyond repair.” I couldn’t be broken beyond repair. I wouldn’t accept that.

Finally, I stopped chattering and the room went so quiet I could hear a man and a woman talking in hushed tones out in the hallway.

Dr. Rick uncrossed his arms and gripped his knees again.

“This is not something I can treat with herbs,” he said. “I know you don’t want needles but I have a straightforward, easy treatment...”

I was about to say No, no, no way, my chop-chop hand on the rise, but Dr. Rick lifted his own hand first. “It won’t hurt too much,” he said, “and I think it can help.”

I looked at him looking at me, a defeated feeling rising. The lack of reaction from him about this story I told…the lack of basic human compassion, sorrow, or even a fragment of surprise…bothered me. A lot. At the same time, this was the reaction of most over the course of my life. After it was behind me, and I was adopted into a new family and then plagued by the horrible dreams, I told my step-family who said, “You’re making it up. That didn’t happen.” Even Steve, back when we were married shrugged me off. (No wonder we fought). The human capacity to shield ourselves from feeling another’s loss and pain is remarkable to behold and evidence of the sorrowful state of the human heart. I know that now, and I suppose I knew it then, too, but seeing such hardness of heart in Dr. Rick made me sad. And vulnerable. Like that little girl in that private room at camp. He wasn’t different, or great, or remarkable no matter his title, his position, his awards. Dr. Rick was just like everyone else, worse in a way, because he was about to do something to my body that I said I didn’t want. Even worse than all that, I was about to allow this to be done by the very person I sought for help. This was the cycle of hell I lived in and had been living in since the summer of 1972. How desperately I wanted out but that was not to be. Not yet and not for a long time to come.

Dr. Rick patted the exam table, a slap-slap sound on the white paper.

“Why don’t you hop on up here and slip off your shoes,” he said.

Next:

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Needled, Rattled, Rebellious

Jennifer’s first treatment for PTSD with Dr. Rick and the surprising result that brings her problem into a stark reality that can’t be denied (or can it).