Stuck

Thank God it's Saturday! It's been another hard week. It's been a good kind of hard where I know I've done some first-rate work, but my body and brain feel beaten. Within the past four weeks, I have had two new couples to work with and four new individuals. The newest one came in yesterday and it was an intense two hour interview. She was born in the late 1950's a month premature. She weighed in at a little over 3 pounds. Soon it was discovered she had an impacted bowel and in a last ditch effort to save her life, surgery was performed. Her early formative weeks were spent in the hospital and for the next 9 years she rotated in and out of hospitals. This prevented the formation of a good bond with her mother and plunged the family into financial disaster. She recalled they had to sell the family car and Dad had to bike a long distance to work.

Her opening words to me were " I feel stuck". At first I considered that might mean her birth had been a long arduous one. But as soon as I heard about her prematurity, the multiple surgeries and hospitalizations, I knew feeling stuck was the theme song of her life. She'd been stuck in an incubator and stuck repeatedly in hospitals. And she'd been stuck over and over with needles, syringes, IVs and who knows what else. It was such a sad story, but everything else in her life began to make sense in light of this horrendous medical history. I came away knowing I would be able to help her even though it will take some time to do so. And as I reviewed the new people I am working with, I realized that these are all tough cases.

One couple doesn't appear will require long term treatment. Unconsciously they did not want to have a second baby, and this drive was so strong that they were destroying their marriage to make sure it wouldn't happen. Once that was uncovered, they began to see that just having one kid was perfectly ok and they were easily able to get back on track. Where do you find that in the analytic books? That a couple would nearly bail out of a perfectly good marriage just to avoid having a second baby?

Oh, and in addition there are still those daily trips to the hospital. Mother seems more comfortable this week. It could be the result of the second epidural. She is more aware and involved in life. She asked me to send off her pledge check to her church, to trim her nails, to write a thank you to her church for the flowers they brought her, and to check what doctor's appointments she had for October. This reflects a vast improvement; however she still needs two people to put her on the pot and can only use the walker with her physical therapist or an aide helping her. She walked 150 feet yesterday and that's an accomplishment. I don't know what is normal anymore. For the time being, normal is includes a once a day visit to the hospital. I caught myself referring to it as my appointment with my mother. Weird expression, but that's what it is.