Category Archives: real life

journal entry from 2008

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i don’t think that people can really understand what it’s like to be tortured by your own mind for so long that the continuous agony of thinking becomes the new norm.  something kind of like i wonder if God is real then will i go to heaven but i don’t know what i believe and do i like that boy still is he even a good guy who are my real friends and are
people really people or are they really demons can i trust anybody if i don’t trust then what and if i think bad thoughts about the Savior then am i unsaved and what if those horrid things were right because it was something i felt inside but i need to not go with what i feel but with what i know what do i know do i really know anything is it even possible to really know anything will i be held accountable for the things i teach as fact when i don’t even know if i can even know and what if someone dies from doing something i knew was going on and i never said anything will i suffer with guilt my whole life will i suffer condemnation in the afterlife?

and to achieve respite only in the sweet hours of sleep each evening, waking to a morning that will begin it all again, as i lie in my bed, wondering where i left off the night before and where i should pick up again this morning. 

bad vision

Quote

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I have a friend who struggles with an anxiety disorder, and she sent me this email the other day and told me I could post it on my blog:

I had a dream that I was in my back yard alone, and this huge wolf came around the corner. It was massive and growling and its hair was standing up. I started to panic and looked around to help me, but there was no one. The wolf started to run at me in slow motion, and it was getting bigger and bigger. As it lunged, I reached my hands out to try to grab its neck and strangle it. I closed my eyes as I began to wrestle with this snarling wolf, and I closed my hands around its neck as hard as I could. We were wrestling on the ground, me on top of it, and I opened my eyes. I panicked, realizing that the wolf had suddenly turned into this adorable house dog (practically a puppy) with a collar on. I jumped up, not understanding how I had suddenly been strangling a harmless puppy. Then I woke up. Sometimes this is how I feel, like I get terrified and paralyzed over things that are, in reality, not a big deal at all…

To which I responded:

I completely get what you’re saying.  For the majority of my life, I have been thinking that puppies were wolves.  It’s just SO HARD to see things correctly when something in our heads/bodies makes us see things wrong!!!

This is the brutal power of mental illness.

tricho

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In Matthew 10:30, Jesus says, “And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”

That is lovely to know as someone with trichotillomania.

Trichotillo-whatta?

Trichotillomania.  The compulsive urge to pull out one’s hair.  NBD. 😉

I’ve suffered from this for years, can’t remember how long– I think maybe I started compulsively pulling my hair out in college.  I am blessed though– some people have it waaaay worse than I do– to where I’ve googled some images and have deemed them too disturbing to post.

Here’s one that’s pretty mild:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My own pulling is from a very specific spot on the back of my head.  Over the years, there have been many times when the back of my head actually is sore because of how much pulling I’ve done.  For a long time, I’ve had a “tuft” there– a small “sprig” of shorter hair, since I let it grow to be a couple inches and then pull it again, so there is a patch of continually short hairs.  But now I have short hair, so you can’t see it, suckas. 🙂

It’s not as big a problem for me now as it used to be, although when I get stressed, I will just sit on the couch and pull and pull– just ask my roommate.  I am gaining mastery over it now, but it used to be this COMPULSION– if I didn’t pull I’d miss this tiny release.  I learned that if I squeeze my hand into a very tight fist, I could sometimes get the same release as a pull.

I know, I know.  One more weird tale from the obsessive-compulsive.

At least I didn’t eat my hair then, as many tricho sufferers do.  If you’re ready for nightmares, google it.

 

set up for failure? what’s your theology?

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Once upon a time, I read a book called Perelandra, written by the amazing C.S. Lewis.

I happened to read it during a week when I was travelling in South Dakota, in a year before I discovered the joys of audiobooks.  It was engrossing– so much so that I may have been reading the paperback while driving down I-29.  This is not a confession. 🙂

Perelandra is Venus, and the protagonist of the book (Dr. Elwin Ransom) travels there, where he finds Venus’ version of pre-fallen Eden, including an Eve character.  There is also an evil character there (Dr. Weston/the Unman), and he and Ransom function as the good and bad angels on the shoulders of “Eve,” each trying to influence her either to commit that first sin or not to.

As you can well imagine, this “conversation” (especially in light of Earth/Eden/the fall of man) would be stimulating to the normal person– to an obsessive-compulsive, it was like sheer panic.  OCs want things to be solved/clear/understood NOW– and instead we are met with the panicked feeling that things will NEVER be that way.

I drove seven hours one day while I was still in the midst of reading that book.  By the time I got home, I screamed in my car.  No joke.

Here’s my question, as we consider Eden:

Did God set us up to fail?

For those in the free will/arminianist camp:
*Wasn’t giving humans free will setting them up to fail?  That is, if you give a created being an option to choose the wrong thing, aren’t you setting them up?

For those in the calvinist camp:
*Did God predestine humanity for failure?

There is also the thought that being set up for failure was perhaps exactly what He intended.

I’d like to generate some discussion on this, especially now that I can consider things without letting my brain blow up!  (Spattered gray matter all over just from obsessions was messy work! 😉 )

So, what do you think?
1) Did God set humanity up to fail?
2) Was His goal really that we would continue in perfection?
3) If He knew the cross would be necessary one day, then doesn’t that show that we were only pawns there in the Garden?

OCD and relationships

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Not just relationships.  Boy-girl relationships.  Romance.  How does it work?

I’m thinking about this because I just had coffee with my dear friend Caitlin and we were talking about when we were first discovering that we had hormones.

Two memories for me:

1) Reading YM Magazine beneath a desk with a girl named Lindsay in 4th grade.  We paged through the magazine, and Lindsay would say of a celebrity, “Oh, look at him.  He’s hot.”  I had to think about it.  Was this okay to say?  It seemed kinda risque (ha!), but I figured it was all right.  Page turn.  My turn: “Oh wow.  Hot.  He’s totally hot, isn’t he?”  Repeat.

2) Watching Little Giants with my friend Jacki in 6th grade.  Devon Sawa made us giddy.   Like, lie-on-our-backs-while-screaming-and-kicking-our-feet-in-the-air giddy.  Hormones, I decided, were wonderful things.

As I got older and my struggle with OCD magnified, things got more muddied in this arena.  (Relationships got trickier than a tween crush on Devon Sawa and JTT?  SHOCKER!)

A couple thoughts on love/romance and OCD, the doubting disease.

In tenth grade, I liked Zac Hanson.  Yes, of MMMBop fame.

(Are you loving these pics? Because I am!)

It was 10th grade.  It was a stupid celebrity crush.  And it would drive me crazy– way too crazy for a 10th-grade celebrity crush.  I would overthink my love for him– and sometimes I would think that maybe I liked Taylor instead, which felt absolutely TREACHEROUS to me.  Then I would feel guilty.  Then I would think in circles until I could boil whatever “issue” I had down into one statement, which I would write in a notebook with a Crayola bold marker.

I mention this because I would carry this action with me for quite some time– thinking in circles until I could come up with a “summary statement.”  I can see now that this was my way of trying to get a handle on things that were too overwhelming for me.

I also mention this because, um, hello– this was too overwhelming for me.  And that’s ridiculous.  And that’s OCD.

Next story.

(Is this post getting way too long?  Just wait.  I have several more stories.)

One day in 7th grade, I thought my friend Lisa looked pretty.  Just a simple thought: “Lisa looks pretty today.”  Then I tore myself to shreds wondering if I was gay.  Years later I would discover that this is SO common of an obsession that there’s a name for it– HOCD, homosexual OCD.  Wow.  I was a textbook case.  I didn’t even want to be gay– and I definitely liked men– and yet, somehow (cough, OCD) I still worked myself into a tizzy.

Along came college.

Freshman year I liked a boy who liked me back.  We got along great, had awesome chemistry, enjoyed each other’s company, the whole shebang.  My OCD chewed the relationship up like a junkyard dog eats garbage.  I remember the night that he told me that he liked me.  We sat in his car till late that night, holding hands, talking over everything.  I was on Cloud Nine.  This gorgeous boy somehow liked little old ME– actually thought I was incredible!– and I remember going back to the Northwestern dorms, waking up Tracy to tell her about the DTR.  Then I went back to my bedroom and cried myself to sleep, completely sick over it.

Doubt creeps in that fast.

I spent the next day convinced that I had to end whatever had just begun.  I can’t tell you how sick I felt over it.  It’s that same feeling when you’ve betrayed your dear friend and she doesn’t know it yet.

He was crazy about me, but I couldn’t handle the sick feeling I had (OCD-induced, although I didn’t know it at the time), and soon after, I had to call it quits.  I remember spending many days down by Lake Johanna, doing another of my little rituals– making list after list, still trying to do the old trick of finding a summary statement I could live with.  I convinced myself that I liked his roommate (whom I did not like) even, which is another whole stupid story.  I just felt like a murderess all the time– and so sinful!  It was doomed.

(Don’t feel too sad– in the end, it wouldn’t have worked anyway!  I don’t regret it.)

One last story.  I hope you’re hanging in there with me on this post.

Post-college.  I had a massive crush on the sweetest boy in the world.  He was adorable, nerdy, wonderful, and we were good friends on our way to becoming even better friends.  I convinced myself that I was not “allowed” to like him and that God would not approve of my crush on him.  Let me be clear on something: this was OCD-induced, not Spirit-induced, which is clear to me now.  It was agonizing.

I felt torn between this boy, whom I loved and who could have helped me to grow in my relationship with Christ, and Christ Himself, who I half-convinced myself was against the relationship.  Notice: half-convinced.  Some days I was certain that it was sinful for me to like this boy; some days I thought I’d be throwing away God’s gift to me if I were to let him go.  OCD, the doubting disease.  I shredded my heart.

It’s interesting to look back through the years now and see OCD’s clear but ugly hand pulling the strings in my life.  What a thief.  Thanks be to God who has rescued me from such an ugly enemy (who sometimes masquerades as a friend!!  LIES!).  When the time comes, and the right boy comes along, this time I’ll be ready for him.  All glory to Jesus for that!!

bullying my bully, part two

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Such an interesting post on this same topic on ocdtalk’s blog!

In my story, Neely discovers this concept through a brochure in her psychiatrist’s office, but in my own life, it came out of NOWHERE.  (God??)  All I’d ever heard of it before was from a friend with an eating disorder who called it “Ed” and talked about it as something separate from herself.  So I randomly started to do something similar, imaginging my OCD as a black dot. 

In real life, people stumble into things, but most of the time in fiction, characters have to be forced.  That’s why I altered my story a little bit as I told Neely’s story.  I mean, how crazy is it to just one day start imagining a little black dot riding in the car’s passenger seat?!

Here’s another scene:

“My OCD wants me to think that thought,” I’d spell out in my head as I continued through the neighborhood, realizing that autumn’s chill had definitely hit Minnesota at full force.  “It’s not actually my thought.  I’m just the messenger.” 

It was an awkward dance, one where I sidled up to the thought and tried to hold its hand.  One foot in front of the other, a stealthy warrior on a tiptoed journey toward freedom. 

“Oh, you’re along?” I said to the black dot that was jogging to keep up with my longer strides.  “Well, keep up, won’t ya?”  I “dressed” it in a child’s train conductor costume and laughed under my breath as it seethed in humiliation.  “Chugga-chugga-choo-chooooo!” I said, pulling a fake train whistle above my head.  “Aren’t you a cute little conductor?”  It glared at me.

Another day, another walk, this time my little black dot in a Scottish kilt and a tiny tam beret.  The day after, a doll-sized sailor suit and white sailor hat.  It had toddled behind me, trying to keep a low profile, which was just fine by me.  By the end of the week I’d landed on an outfit for keeps—a pink tutu with tights and ballet slippers, which my OCD hated worse than all the rest.  I was bullying my bully, and it felt powerful.  Whenever my mind started to race, I said to my OCD in its ballerina getup, “You there!  Start twirling!”  And so it would, even as it boiled with rage.  “Keep on twirling!” I said with a smile.  “I’ll tell you when you can stop … little one.”

I felt an odd sense of control that I’d never had before, not completely free of OCD, but like someone separate from it.  I didn’t need to get my toes wet; I could stand on the dry bank, command my orders, and get back to work.

Isn’t it interesting that something that seems so crazy is actually what’s keeping an obsessive-compulsive from craziness?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this concept.  Leave a comment!

what it feels like

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I just had an OCD dream.  Is that even possible?

In it, my mom was talking about Halloween and beseeching me to guard myself against dark powers on that day (my mom is not generally a nut about these kinds of things, but she was very passionate in my dream), and I was telling her that I was protected because I have Christ … when I began to doubt my salvation.  In my dream. 

Weird.  Never have done that before.

And I woke up to those same old feelings of terror that dominated me for so long.

I was reading OCDTalk blog and read a post about what OCD felt like (the link will take you there).  She wrote:

* You have that feeling you get after swerving to avoid a potentially fatal car accident.

* You have that feeling you get when you take your eyes off of your child in a store for one minute, and then he/she is gone.

With the above examples, your physical and mental distress dissipates once the blackboard scratching stops, you avoid the accident, or you’ve located your child. But try to imagine having those feelings of intense anxiety repeatedly, perhaps hundreds of times a day. That is what some sufferers say life with severe OCD feels like.

Those were the two examples that resonated most with me– I wrote a couple things over the past three years trying to describe what OCD felt like.  Here’s a poem that reminds me of how I just woke up from my dream– the feeling that I’m trying to let drain out of me right now as I blog:

TERROR

 I remember in junior high when for Christmas I received
an old-fashioned alarm clock, two bells like golden mushrooms
and the tiny hammer that trilled between them. 
The alarm was like crashing through four levels of reality
in mere seconds, like being doused with water from the Atlantic,
like defibrillator plates on my chest, shocking me into the morning,
like frozen hands slapping my brain.  These days,
it is as though the golden clock of my childhood has taken up residence
inside my chest, where it is continuously ringing, jolting me back to the
Issue at Hand whenever I forget, for a moment, to be scared.

Here’s another line from my book:

I worked myself into hysterics by that evening, an amusement park ride spinning out of control.  Terror licked at my heart and felt permanent: I just knew that nothing would ever be right again. 

And here’s one last one.  I hope it helps you to understand.

It reminded me of my later years of high school, when Charlotte’s and my friend Terri started to go to parties in our classmates’ cornfields, where she would steal cigarettes from boys’ mouths to take her own drag.  Jeremy Mason’s back forty was the preferred party spot for our small class, although from time to time, the melee would move over to Madison Prewett’s pasture pond.  And sometimes, as if they were begging to be stereotyped, the group would convene for indiscretion at the railroad trestle just outside of the Collins Falls city limits.

At the time, I was stuck in my own paradoxical world—worrying that God wasn’t real, and that because I thought so, He would send me to hell—and so had no time for petty crimes like underaged drinking, which would only muddy my already-soiled “record.” 

            The one time I made it out to the trestle was on a Sunday afternoon, the day after a party where half of my class had gotten minors.  Terri had shirked the police but dropped her cell phone while fleeing the scene, so the next day, she asked me and Charlotte to help her look.  Charlotte, who had just gotten both her license and the Voyager, drove us to the scene in a reckless fashion she’d never outgrow.

            The site had an abandoned, makeshift fire pit and empty cans of Coors Light scattered all around like eggs at an Easter hunt.  The fire pit had a few hay bales around it that someone or another had brought out in his pickup truck, and all this was at the base of the western hill.  From the top of that hill, the trestle bridge ran out straight to the eastern bank, at least 120 feet high in the center of
the bridge and about a quarter of a mile from one end to the other.  It looked rickety and ominous, like the oldest rollercoaster at the amusement park.

            “Call my number,” demanded Terri, as we started to climb the western hill.  “I ran this way, trying to get into the trees.” 

            We were nearly at the top when we heard the old Nokia ring.  Terri located it and wiped it off on her jeans.  “Good as new,” she pronounced.

            The three of us turned around and looked down the hill, then across the long stretch of tracks with the support frames branching out beneath them like Tim Burton’s grotesque version of gothic
giraffe legs or the Imperial walkers on planet Hoth.  “Let’s go across it,” said Terri, her eyes shining.

            “Oh gosh,” said Charlotte.  “Really?”

            “I’ve done it before,” said Terri.  “It’s really not that big of a deal.”

            “What if a train comes?” I asked.

            “That’s the point,” said Terri.  “It’s scary because you don’t know if a train could be coming just around the corner.  I mean, it probably won’t, but you don’t know that.  If a train comes, then you
have to run for it.”

            “Okay,” I said, and the words shocked me as they left my mouth.  I felt as if someone had bumped into me and I’d accidentally burped them out. 

            “Really?” asked Terri.

            “Yeah, really?” asked Charlotte.

            Now my stomach was reeling as I looked down the side of the hill we’d come up.  It was a long way down.  I moved over to the tracks and stood in the middle of them, facing the bridge.  It was so far across, and so terribly narrow.  I wondered briefly if we could somehow climb down the support beams if the worst came to the worst.  “Let’s just do it,” I said.  “Let’s get going.  It’s going to be fine.”

            And so we walked across the trestle then, a quarter mile from safety to safety, and the whole time we marched across those wooden slats, none of us spoke but Terri, who said, “Whoa,” in the
middle of the bridge, when she looked over the edge.  She said, “It’s actually worse in daylight,” and then we continued on, a silent march, ears tuned for any shrieking whistle just around the bend.  I felt bent over with tension, as if my shoulders were knotting up the way water boils in a pot.  My stomach felt hollow and greasy. 

            It’s nothing, I told myself.  Nothing is coming.   But it didn’t calm me. My heart beat like a steady roll on a snare.  It was one of the most terrible and memorable experiences of my young life, and my mind was ravaged with images of three bodies lying still in the rushes below.  Every step felt like sheer panic flowing up from my toes to my chest, rattling my heart then moving like a laser beam to my head, where I manufactured nightmares.

            And now, all these years later, this memory was like putting a finger on the pulse of that evening: absolute terror, only this time, there was no safety in sight.  Just the feel of walking on an endless, narrow railroad trestle, listening, straining for the sound of destruction on its way to meet me.

CBT prep …

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  I looked at the back cover of Freedom for Today’s Obsessive-Compulsive.  Apparently Steve Jewett and James Nash were some big names in the OCD world.  “Open this book,” the back cover read, “and unlock the doors of your mind’s prison.  What lies ahead of you is freedom.”  The goal was appealing, and I liked the confident wording.  Just straight to the point: “What lies ahead of you is freedom.”  Well, okay.

            I opened to a random page and read, If I were to say to you, ‘Don’t think about a red unicorn,’ what would happen next?  Why, immediately, you’d begin to think of a red unicorn!  In fact, I’m sure that’s what’s in your mind’s eye right now as you continue to read this page.  That is what we’re dealing with as we fight OCD.  An obsessive-compulsive experiences an intrusive, unwanted thought, and because it is intrusive, he feels disgusted by it, wants to stop thinking that particular thought.  But just as my telling you, ‘Don’t think about a red unicorn’ results in your immediately doing so, the obsessive-compulsive’s panic and desire to stop thinking the intrusive thought actually drive him to continue thinking about that very thing.”

            Well, that was certainly true enough.  When my worst thoughts arose in my mind and I tried to stamp them out, it was a battle of escalation.  The harder I fought, the harder I needed to fight. 

            “In cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT),” the book continued, “we encourage the obsessive-compulsive to give in to those intrusive thoughts, to stop fighting them.  Time and time again, CBT experts have found that it is when an obsessive-compulsive stops fighting the intrusive thoughts and actually embraces them that he finds freedom from them.”

            Oh gosh.  I set the book down, my heart beginning to race.  It wasn’t new information to me—Ruth’s brochure had given me the basics of behavior therapy—but the way it was worded gave me a chill.  “Give in to those intrusive thoughts.” 

             “So I’m reading this book for Dr. Foster, right?” I said a couple nights later at Rosie’s Place to Stella before she opened her laptop.  “It’s like reading my own biography.”

            “Yeah?” she asked, taking a sip of something foamy.  “What do you mean?”

            “Well,” I said, “you know how all my ‘issues’ seem so bizarre?  Some of them are not bizarre at all, I mean in the world of OCD.  I’m textbook.  It’s crazy really.” 

            “Like?”  Stella began to sort through the tangled mess of beads she was wearing—black, red, maroon, picasso jasper.  These, in addition to a floral chambray shirt and hiking shorts.

            “Okay,” I said, “so there are all these made-up scenarios, and the book circles back to revisit these same examples.  One of them is a dad who’s sure he’s going to kill his baby girl, so he won’t even hold her.  He gets all these images in his head of suffocating her, stabbing her in her little chest, shaking her, drowning her.”

            “Ew,” she said, still fussing with her beads.

            “Yeah, but these thought make him completely sick,” I explained.  “It’s clear to everyone else, including his wife and therapist, that he would never ever hurt his daughter.  I mean, they’re not freaking out.  He’s the one avoiding alone time with his daughter.

            “And there’s this lady who thinks she might be a lesbian even though she isn’t attracted to women.  Every woman she walks by, she thinks, ‘Am I attracted to her?  Do I want to kiss her?’ then she imagines herself kissing that woman.  She’s just sick over it, but instead of thinking, ‘Oh, I guess not.  That’s not a pleasing image to me,’ she thinks, ‘I must be gay.  Why else would I be thinking so much about kissing women?’  This is called HOCD—homosexual OCD.

“But then get this.  One of the example scenarios is about this girl who has these blasphemous images attack her mind.  She … she pictures herself having sex with Jesus.”  Stella looked bemused, but I continued.  “She doesn’t want to think about that, but there are all these triggers in her normal day—when she sees someone praying, or a cross around someone’s neck, or a kissing scene in a movie or on TV.  And whenever there’s nothing else to think about, that’s where her thoughts go.  She believes that her thoughts are blasphemous, so she believes that she will go to hell.  She thinks about hell all the time.  The book even said that she confessed to her priest, and even he said she was fine, but she couldn’t believe it.  Whenever the image of having sex with Christ came into her head, she said a Hail Mary to alleviate her guilt and drive the image away.  Eventually she had to quit her job because she was too distracted saying her Hail Marys to get work done.”

            Stella’s eyebrows furrowed.  “Gosh, that does sound like you!”  She abandoned the necklaces she’d been working on and clasped her hands together on the table between us, leaning forward as she listened.

            “I know!  I mean, elements are different, for sure, but the basic idea is the same.”

            Stella sighed.  “I used to think that OCD meant that people were super clean.”  She chewed on the inside of her cheek.  I knew what she was thinking, even though she didn’t say it aloud: It’s so much worse than that.

            “Yeah,” I said, agreeing both with what was said and unsaid.  “Even the people who are really clean, or who wash their hands all the time—they’re driven to it.  They think something horrible is going to happen if they don’t do it. It’s so much bigger than just being a neat freak.  It kinda drives me nuts when people with quirks say, ‘I’m a little OCD myself.’”

Stella nodded violently.  “Remember that receptionist job I took at that plastic surgeon’s?  One day this nose-job lady came in, right?  She sat beside a burn survivor, pointed at his dressings, then at her own protective shell covering the bridge of her nose, and said, ‘I know how you feel.  Hang in there.’”

“I don’t believe you,” I said, jaw dropped.  “You’re joking.”

“I’m not,” she said.  “I’ve never been so pissed at a job site before.  I’d take the call center perverts over those rich bastards any day.”  She shook her head in disbelief.  “So … therapy?”

            “Therapy,” I said.  “I guess it’s like a pyramid, and you climb to the top, step by step—if you don’t reach the pinnacle event, CBT probably won’t work.  In the book examples, the dad had to write down all the ways he was going to murder his daughter—graphically!—and then record himself reading it, and he had to listen to it over and over.” 

Stella looked disgusted.

            “The HOCD person had to rate women’s butts and record everything in a notebook, and she had to read a couple LGBT novels.  And the one with religious obsessions had to write a story about having sex with Jesus Christ and then read it over and over again without saying any Hail Mary prayers.”

            Stella made a face but nodded slowly.  “So what will you have to do?”

            I shrugged.  “All I know is that it will be terrible.”

            And for once, I appreciated it when Stella didn’t reassure me.  There was more strength in knowing she agreed.  “I don’t know what to do,” I confessed. 

            “Write about it,” she said.  So I did.


OCD

There he is, that scarlet beast,
black horn like a railway spike.
I check myself against the blood-red giant,
close my eyes, cover my ears,
two-thirds of the famous monkey trio
where I sit cross-legged between cloven hooves.
Do not think of a red unicorn.  Do not do it.
But I can feel his wet, warm breaths like humid whispers
as he lowers his nostrils to my neck, crimson ears at salute
like a maddening accusation.

PANDAS

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The PANDAS that I’m talking about has nothing to do with these guys …

 

 

 

 

 

… and everything to do with childhood strep throat.

PANDAS = Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infections

Say what???

PANDAS describes a set of children in whom an ordinary bacterial strep infection can turn into a neuropsychiatric disorder.  The strep seems to cause the body’s immune system to build up antibodies that – who knows why – turn traitor and attack the basal ganglia in the brain.

In other words, a simple case of strep throat gone to hell.

Sometimes a child gets strep throat, and the body gets confused– instead of fighting off the bacteria, it attacks the basal ganglia … which leads to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The first time I had an intake with a psychiatrist, she asked about my past medical issues.  “Ummm … I broke my elbow twice,” I said, thinking how a broken bone had nothing to do with my head issues.  I reached: “And I’ve had strep throat like a million times.”  I felt a little stupid and way too thorough.  Keep it to related issues, I thought to myself.  Duh.

But my psychiatrist perked up.  “Did you know there’s a strong connection between strep throat and OCD?” the doctor asked me.

Apparently, this is a little controversial, and some doctors aren’t convinced.  But come on– how many cases of strep-followed-by-rapid-onset-of-OCD do you have to see before you raise an eyebrow at the connection?

My doctor– Dr. Suck-Won Kim, the absolutely brilliant OCD expert at the University of Minnesota– believes there is a strong correlation, and I’m in his court.

A scene cut from my book:

“You have heard of PANDAS?” he asked.

            “I have,” I said, although I couldn’t remember at the moment what it stood for.  “It’s when kids get strep throat and then OCD.  Or something like that.”  I realized that I probably sounded stupid, explaining PANDAS to an OCD expert.

            “So many PANDAS studies … it has to be solved because far more OCD cases are strep-linked than people know.”

            “Yes, I had strep a lot as a kid.”

“YOU DID? YOU SEE?!”  Dr. Lee became animated as if a moment ago I’d said no such link between strep and OCD existed but now he was proving me wrong.

“The first time I met with a psychiatrist, she asked about my medical history.  I didn’t have a lot to share, but I happened to throw it out there that I’d had strep throat a lot, and she said it was probably connected.”

“She knew that?” asked Dr. Lee, impressed.  “That is uncommon.  Most doctors have no clue.” 

For more information on PANDAS, feel free to check out

I think I had strep throat nine times as a child.  Can anyone beat that?  Leave a comment!