Dog Medicine (9 page)

S
UMMER
1994

The summer before my senior year in college, before New York, I worked as a hostess at a restaurant near Ohio State. For a month or two, I lived in my own apartment, but I moved back home the morning after someone was shot on the sidewalk in front of my one-story building.

Being home wore on me. One day, when the feelings took over, I took a knife from the butcher block, ran to the basement and pressed the blade into my skin until I felt pain. That same day, my mother made me come to a birthday dinner for Clay at a fancy restaurant. She was scared to leave me alone, so I was forced to sit, looking disheveled, with Clay and his latest girlfriend as my dad and brother made jokes that struck me as wildly sexist and rude. On the way home from that restaurant, I tried to jump out of my dad's car while he sped along the freeway at 70 miles an hour.

The next day, my mother made my first-ever appointment with a therapist. I went with curious reluctance to her office, sat down in a depressing brown room and heard, for the first time, a professional say, “Your parents tell me that they're worried about you. Can you imagine why that might be?” I explained my circumstances, then couldn't stand listening to the therapist say in a sickly sweet tone, “An older brother is supposed to protect his younger sister. He's supposed to help her, teach her, be kind to her.”

“On TV, maybe,” I scoffed. “Whatever. All siblings fight.”

“Yes, but not like this, they don't. Not like this,” her tone shifted and I wondered if I'd exaggerated the stories.

“Julie, you have every right to tell your brother that what he's done to you has affected you.”

“Sure, but you don't know what he'll do if I confront him,” I said.

“Do you mean that he'll harm you if you bring up the fact that he hurt you both physically and emotionally when you were a young child?” Her nostrils flared in outrage.

“No. No,” I said, laughing a little. This was getting ridiculous.

“I doubt he realizes how his treatment affected you,” she said. “He needs to know, for his own sake.”

“Why?” I asked.

“He's got to know how you feel, that he hurt you, that his treatment was intolerable. That he can't go around treating people with such disregard.”

“I would never say that to him,” I said. “Intolerable. He would laugh in my face. Besides, he's not awful to everyone. Just me.”

“Julie, you need to remember this: His treatment of you has nothing to do with you,” she said, so sure of herself.

What? It had everything to do with me. He really hated me, which in turn, made me hate myself. He was my older brother, my role model, the male with whom I spent most of my waking hours. And he hated me. This was what I knew, deeply, at my core. How was I supposed to learn that I was anything other than what he told me? Asking me to stray from the knowledge that he hated me would be like asking a baby born in zero gravity to walk. No matter what inflated praise my father infrequently showered upon me, or how often my mother made me a nice meal, I wanted, above all, for Clay to love me. Instead, he hit me, insulted me, knocked my door down, stepped on my head, argued with me, then pushed me to the ground until I submitted, and this left me dead inside.

Over three sessions, my therapist convinced me to confront him. I rehearsed what I would say. I practiced in the car and in the shower. That weekend, when he stopped home for a visit, I asked him if I could speak to him alone in my bedroom. This itself was
unusual. We both acted nonchalant, though we knew this was something we did not do—talk.

I sat on my bed and waited for him to come to my room. He arrived eating chips, a handful cupped to his stomach. “I've been talking with my therapist,” I said, shaking slightly, squeezing my flattened, sweaty palms together. “And I want to tell you that the way you treated me over the years has really hurt me and she says it even qualifies as abuse. Like, sibling abuse,” I said. Looking back, I don't know what I was expecting him say:
Oh! You're right! I'm so sorry! What an ass I've been!

I was so caught up in actually getting the words out that I flinched when he started yelling. “Fuck you!” he screamed, potato chips flying from his teeth to my bedspread. He swallowed hard, then hissed, “Jesus Christ, you fucking
bitch
!” He walked toward the door, cursing under his breath, “Holy fucking
Christ
!” I sat with my mouth open mid-word.

What I saw in that moment, in his reaction, felt like a revelation.
He
was hurt. And it wasn't because of anything I said; it was because of something in him. Something made him feel so terrible that he took it out on me. His overly emotional reaction pulled the first veil off of our troubled relationship. I was old enough to see that his hurting me stemmed from his own pain. For a split second, I
was
curious. I was a growing woman examining her hurting older brother. But when he turned around and screamed, “See if I invite you to my fucking wedding!” I was a child again. I nearly fell backwards. We'd never truly fought as adults, except for once when he pushed me to the floor because I thought we should boil our corn on the cob and he thought we should grill it. But now I'd been banished from his future, theoretical wedding. I'd been punished with exile.

He left the room, continuing to curse and mutter down the hallway, and I sat quietly in my room, watching out the window. I heard him slam the front door and drive away. My mom padded down to my bedroom. “What on earth happened?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Sheesh,” she said, shaking her head and walking back to the kitchen.

I instantly hated the therapist and decided to stop seeing her—summer was almost over anyway. I lay on my bed wondering if he really would exclude me from his wedding. Could he do that? No. My parents wouldn't let him. I berated myself for my stupidity, thankful that the next week I was due to leave home and go back to college. I couldn't get out of my house fast enough, and spent the next few days packing my room, meticulously cleaning it, as if I were leaving and never, ever coming back.

M
AY
1996


The morning after I walked down the driveway with my father, my parents asked me to see a psychiatrist. I said I would, but added that no doctor or therapist had ever helped before. What made them think this would be any different? “This woman is an MD,” my dad said, “and she comes very highly recommended by Jon at the firm whose daughter is anorexic.” I wondered about my father's life at his law firm. Were they a more satisfying family than us? Did he sit in their offices and talk about his troubles because he could never really relate to any of us at home?

“I wish I was anorexic,” I said. “At least I'd be fucked up and thin.”

“You don't mean that, Julie,” my mom said.

“Whatever,” I mumbled.

“You have an appointment tomorrow at 10,” my dad said. “Here's the address.” He handed me a yellow piece of paper with an address scribbled in his bubbly cursive. The fact that my father had participated in the acquisition of my health care meant that the situation had officially turned dire. A numbness came over me. My ears buzzed. I closed my eyes.

“Okay?” he asked, taking my knee and jiggling it.

“Fine,” I said.

My mom glanced at my dad with relief, and he crossed his arms and watched me as if I were a puzzle he had yet to solve.

The next morning I looked forward to the appointment with the shrink. I didn't shower before going, just pulled on black
pants, a black shirt, and my steel-toed boots and got in the car. I drove to the building, a glossy, black-windowed office tower in a characterless suburban office park. I sat for a moment after killing the engine, preparing myself. I felt like a boxer entering a ring. This lady had no idea what was about to hit her. I skipped the elevator, took the echoing stairs, and checked in at the yellow Formica front desk.

I flipped through a
National Geographic
, stealing glances at all the other crazies in the waiting room. There was an obese woman with buzzed hair minus a thin braid that she kept about three feet long. She fiddled with the braid and stared at the wall.

“Julie?” a voice said. I stood up and smiled instinctively, then remembered that I had promised myself not to fake anything. I had to be honest this day. My life depended on it.

The psychiatrist wasn't what I expected. She looked like someone's mom. She had short brown hair and was wearing a long denim skirt with a gray and white flowered turtleneck. Her desk was flanked by four tall gray filing cabinets, everything except the computer stacked messily with papers. I flopped down on the black leather couch and stared at the back of her head as she wrote something on a clipboard. She swiveled around to face me.

“Hi,” she glanced at the clipboard, “Julie. I'm Dr. Miller. I understand your parents are very concerned about you. Can you tell me why that might be?”

I had to stifle laughter. She was so earnest. So ridiculously fake. She didn't care about me. She didn't
know
me. This was her job. Then, I thought,
I can't take this anymore
, and I felt the tears coming.

“Good luck fixing me,” I said, staring at the floor, failing to fight the tears that betrayed my attempt at a steely exterior. “I've been to about ten therapists and no one has been able to help.”

“Well, I'm not a therapist,” she said. “I'm a psychiatrist. I'm an M.D. I can help you figure out if there's something wrong physiologically that we might be able to help you with.”

My cheeks flushed.
Fuck
. This was bad. I'd been sent to the crazy doctor. Maybe this had all gone too far. Surely I could snap out of it. Shame fluttered through me, and the tears came hard.

“Can you tell me why you're crying?” Dr. Miller said in a quiet voice.

“Because I always fucking cry,” I said. “It's my thing.”

“Okay, can you tell me what you're feeling right now?”

I wanted to tell her that I was terrified, that I didn't want to go to an institution, or that maybe I did. I just couldn't fathom feeling better, and I didn't know if I wanted to feel better anymore.

Instead I told her about Clay, about my dad working all the time and my mom always being
fine
and never really talking to me. I told her about losing my boyfriend and leaving my job in New York and not knowing what I was going to do with my life. I told her about hating Ohio, about hating myself, about sleeping and eating sugar to dull the pain, about having no friends left.

“Do you ever think about suicide?” she asked. We made eye contact. I knew enough about doctors to know that you never tell them you're thinking about suicide if you really are.

“Not really,” I said. “Just being really injured. I want someone in a hospital to take care of me. I want to be broken so I can be fixed.”

“Okay,” she said, like we were done. She swiveled back to her desk. I checked the clock. We'd been talking for forty-four minutes. She handed me a piece of paper and said, “Take this to the front desk and they'll get you all set up.”

“Set up with what?” I asked, thinking they were going to wrap me in a straitjacket and toss me down the old laundry chute reserved for the too-far-gone cases.

“Just a follow-up appointment with a new therapist, and maybe some medication,” she said. “Thanks so much for agreeing to come. You did the right thing.” She gave me a tight smile before looking back down at her paperwork. I stepped into the hallway and she closed the door behind me. I stared at a faded picture in a flimsy
silver frame on the wall, an eagle soaring over pine trees. Then I read the paper in my hands. She'd circled, “Major Depression—MD—First Episode.”

I wanted to collapse and cheer. I'd been given a checkbox for a fucking psychiatric disorder. There was a reason that this was happening, but holy shit, I was sick-in-the-head! I had never known anyone who had been diagnosed with depression. In my quick estimation, this was shameful and scary. I felt swept away by this piece of paper, and there was not a bone in my body that thought for a moment that the psychiatrist might be wrong. I took a deep breath to let it soak in. Then, as was my habit, I placed this diagnosis right next to all the other diagnoses I'd absorbed over the years. Ugly, Weird, Stupid, Fat, Unlikable, please meet your newest teammate: Depressed.

M
AY
1996

I sat on my living room floor in front of the television. Pamphlets and stapled stacks of paper surrounded me. My parents were trying to look busy in the kitchen while sneaking glances as I read about these drugs they wanted me to swallow, these drugs that would change my brain. Because something was terribly wrong with my brain. All of this felt like a kick to the gut.

The picture on the front of the Zoloft pamphlet showed a sunrise under bright blue, italicized block letters
.
The blue-jean-dress psychiatrist had given me a prescription for this medication, and I left her office convinced I would never take such a drug. The thought of swallowing medication that would affect my brain seemed ludicrous. Why would I ever do such a thing?

Still, as I drove home from her office, down the central Ohio roads cradled under huge trees with brilliant green leaves, I felt a shift. This dark, scary, oh-so-phenomenal pain I was suffering might be treatable by a drug. If they'd made a drug for the awful way I felt, then this was something others had felt before too. That thought alone pulled me one smidge out of the blackness. There were others like me. But where? Were they all hiding on their parents' couches too? Why didn't anyone ever talk to me about feeling down?
Really
down? Was this so shameful that it shouldn't be discussed aloud?

After my flat-out refusal to take the drug, my parents went into research mode. My dad found and printed every piece of
data he could about depression and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). He brought them home and handed them to me. “Just read it and see what you think,” he said. “You don't have to do anything.”

Part of me wanted to remain this way—fucked up and sad—to show my poor, gallant, hopeful, caring father that some things weren't fixable, especially people. Or to punish him, to expose that I was broken partly because of his absences. But those truths were beginning to be overrun by the bit of me that wanted to feel happiness: genuine, deep, inside-out happiness. I wondered if I could be happy; I honestly didn't know. I didn't know how being okay and staying okay felt. The thought was enticing enough that I continued reading the Zoloft pamphlets.

I read about side effects, hoping for weight loss and skin improvements, but instead found weight gain and loss of libido. Then I read what this drug helped eliminate: prolonged feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and worthlessness, sometimes running in the family, sometimes not. The pamphlets described an inability to function that was sometimes triggered by traumatic events such as breakups or moves, and childhood events such as abuse and neglect. This was
me
. Had my parents forged this? Had my dad hired a doctor friend to write this just for my convincing?

After an hour of leafing through the pages, I landed at the final conclusion: Why not? It couldn't get much worse. I gathered the pile of documentation that Sunday morning and walked into the dining room where my parents were reading the newspaper. I stood before them, their faces open and hopeful. “Okay,” I said.

“Okay what?” my mom said.

“Okay, she'll take the medication,” my dad said, smiling at me. My mom's eyes searched mine, wanting confirmation that he was right.

“Sure,” I said. “Why the fuck not? It's just my brain.”

“Julie,” my mom chided.

“Fuck it. It can't get much worse,” I said, noticing a hummingbird hovering outside at a yellow and red feeder. My parents, in their silence, agreed.

Within the hour, my mom drove the prescription to the drug store. My dad and I sat and watched a football game on television while we waited for the pills to come.

“Want anything?” my dad asked before he went to the kitchen for a handful of cookies and a soda.

“Nope, I'm fine,” I said, acutely aware of how far from fine I was. The decision to take the pills terrified me. I was sick, really sick. I sat on the couch huddled in a ball and fell asleep without noticing.

When my mom came back from the store, I woke up and went to the kitchen. She handed me the pills and we stood on opposite sides of the kitchen's island.

“You know what else might help me?” I said. Her face brightened like I'd just told her we'd won ten million dollars while she was at the drug store. The fact that I had a potential solution for my terrible malaise appeared astonishing to her.

“A puppy,” I said. I could hardly believe I'd said it. I was sure my mother would laugh at the idea, but she didn't laugh or scoff or sigh. She knew me well enough to know that this wasn't a joke or a dark stab at a stupid solution. “One that's mine,” I said.

“I think that's a great idea.” Her face relaxed. Then her tone shifted into skepticism. “I'm not sure what Cinder will think, but that's okay.” She offered a nervous laugh. Her ever-so-slight negative reaction to my very first attempt at self-help bristled deeply. Didn't she know how hard I was trying?

“She'll be fine,” I said, starting to walk away, knowing I was being an asshole but too hurt and sensitive to help myself.

“What kind do you want?” my mom asked as I left the kitchen,
then, “Great idea, honey!” she said, just before I slammed my bedroom door.

Here we were again. My mother said something innocent that cut me sideways, and I couldn't stop the rage. I couldn't stop wanting to punish her when all she was trying to do was love me in the best way she knew how.

 

J
UNE
26, 1996

I'd been taking the medication for seven days but still didn't feel different. Mornings were tough; waking up was the hardest. I would lie in bed for an hour or more after my body awoke. Physically getting up felt too emotionally difficult. My parents' mantra had become
Two weeks.
Two weeks until the medication kicks in. They were desperately hoping the Zoloft would help lift me out of the darkness.

We'd talked about getting the dog soon, and over oatmeal that Sunday, without asking her to, my mom perused the classifieds looking for puppies. She held a steaming cup of coffee in her hand as she read aloud, “Australian shepherds six weeks AKC, beagle puppies, German shepherd . . .” She was scanning down the page to golden retrievers. I'd gone to the bookstore and bought two books:
Prozac Nation
and
A Guide to Your Purebred Puppy
. I tore through
Prozac Nation
, a little frightened by Elizabeth Wurtzel's too familiar, dark and self-destructive reaction to feeling the same way I did. When I needed a break from the Wurtzel book, I perused the puppy book. Each breed was ranked according to traits like the amount of exercise required, the ease of training, and sociability with strangers. I earmarked about eight breeds in the sporting group: Brittany spaniels, golden and flat-coated retrievers, Labrador retrievers, Irish setters, Weimaraner and English springer spaniels. I studied each page with surprising focus and found myself returning to golden retrievers: easy to train, loyal, big, great running partners, and beautiful. A family dog. My new family.

I also bought a book on training and was reading about how to bring a dog home so that the transition was as smooth and trauma-free as possible. I bought a crate, food bowls, and a leash. The preparation was a welcome distraction.

“Golden retriever, AKC pups, ready to go,” my mom pointed at the newspaper with her cherry-red fingernail. I had to grin as she put down her coffee, snatched up a purple pen, and circled the ad. “Here's another one. Golden Pups, Parents on Site, City of Alexandria.” She circled that one too and wrote down both phone numbers. I was learning to recognize that my mother's willingness to help me get things done was the way she tried to connect with me. This was how she knew to express herself: with actions, not words. I hadn't apologized for my rudeness the other night. I never apologized to my mother; she rarely asked it of me; and still, she showed up. I imagine now that I would have imploded much earlier had she punished me or been angry about my awful behavior. These are things I didn't consider then. I couldn't fathom not having my mother with me, on my side, always forgiving me until I finally figured out that inflicting pain on her was not actually what I wanted to do. How very lucky I was.

She called two of the phone numbers, and they confirmed that we could come see the puppies that day. We dressed quickly, jumped into her top-down red convertible and pulled out of the driveway. It was a blissful mid-summer day in central Ohio: seventy degrees, bright sun, and puffy clouds. Flowers bloomed everywhere. The summer bugs were just beginning their daily chorus.

I'd begun seeing a new therapist named Mya. She was young—a therapist in training. She was under thirty years old, had just moved to Ohio from Seattle, and I liked her immediately. Her soft-spoken tenderness put me at ease. She was pretty with straight brown hair and striking green eyes. She crossed her legs at her ankles and wore solid colored skirts that ended just below her knee. I told her about
wanting a puppy and she said she thought that sounded like a perfect idea.

My mom drove us down our street and turned onto the long two-lane road that would eventually lead us to the highway. We didn't talk. I leaned back in the seat, holding an old towel. The book said that the best place for a puppy to ride home was on a towel in his new owner's lap. I couldn't imagine a wiggly puppy wanting to sit in my lap in a convertible. Maybe we'd have to put the top up.

The first litter we saw was at a house in the suburbs east of Columbus. We walked up onto the front porch and a friendly middle-aged woman came outside, pointing us to the walkway around the side of the house.

“They're all back here,” she said, wiping her palms on a soiled apron with faded pink flowers. “We have two of them sold already, but two are still available. Both females.” We opened a chain link gate and saw a six-foot-wide wire pen in the center of a big grassy lawn. The flimsy metal practically burst with the excitement from the puppies.

They were irresistible: fuzzy white blond fur, eager sparkly brown eyes, and big floppy paws. The woman's three children also came out to the yard, and they showed us that it was okay to reach in and pick up a puppy, let it run in the grass. Each puppy barked and squirmed, jumping in an effort to be free. I laughed and picked up a little female. Her razor-sharp puppy teeth grazed my hand as she leapt out of my grasp to go run in the yard. Within a minute, she was in a full sprint, racing to catch up with her siblings. She stumbled and landed chin first in the grass, her little tail flailing. She regained her footing, sat up, shook her head, and took off again. We watched them play, happy in their freedom, but the pups didn't come back to us. They played in the yard, oblivious to our voices. I went over to them, tried to call one to
me. I'd read in the book that when you're choosing a puppy, the puppies that wander off and don't look back are likely to do that when they're grown up as well. I turned to my mom who stood smiling with her arms crossed.

“Let's go look at the other litter,” I whispered.

“Okay,” she nodded. She turned to the woman and said, “Thank you so much for showing us your beautiful puppies. We'll let you know if we decide one of them is right for us.” I was so impressed with how my mom said her polite no-thank-you. I nodded in an awkward way that was supposed to convey,
Thanks
and
Sorry.
Neither sentiment translated and the lady gestured in a way that said:
I'm not insulted. Should I be insulted?
I felt overwhelmed. I hated people. I wanted to go home and hide on the couch.

We got back in the car and drove farther east past the Franklin County line, way out into the countryside toward the little hamlet of Alexandria. A few trees lined the roads, and beyond them stretched endless fields: soy, corn, wheat, and potatoes all the way to the horizon. These fields calmed me with their simplicity, their singular purpose. We drove down near-empty country roads that every once in a while intersected another two-lane road. We'd stop, look around, then continue on our way. Birds perched idle on telephone wires, some taking off with the approaching rush of our engine, their wings pulling them up higher, higher, and away.

I closed my eyes, breathed deep. These were just like the roads I ran on during my last semester of my senior year in college. My classes were over by 2 p.m., so every day at two thirty I strapped on my running shoes and left campus. The only promise I made to myself was that I would jog slowly, take a different route every day, look up at the trees and sky when I ran, and only skip one day a week. It was the beginning of a few of the happiest, most peaceful months of my life. In New York, I would walk down shadowy sidewalks dreaming of the openness of central Ohio, yearning for roads flanked by fields, for their freedom and isolation. These roads
cradled me. I realized this now. I'd been trying to hate Ohio, because it was so hard to be at home. But the land had actually always been there for me all along. As a child, the moon had lit my room on sad nights. I'd wandered cornfields and puttered around at Lehman's Pond. Those were some of my best childhood memories. And here we were, my mother and I, only thirty or so miles south of my college, sailing along a quiet country road after my breakdown, on the search for my new family. I comprehended at that moment that I was beginning to actively try to heal.

As we neared the farm, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, letting my head fall back so that the sun warmed my pale face. I accepted that lovely moment with gratitude and hope.

When I felt the car turn, I squinted and saw a long gravel driveway flanked on either side by fields that had gone to seed with weeds and wildflowers. At the end of the driveway stood a tall white farmhouse cradled by a crescent of century-old trees. Dogs barked as our tires crunched up the drive. A lanky red golden retriever ran toward our car, tail wagging, barking, hackles raised. A few puppies ran in the yard behind the house, free of fences. This was looking good so far.