🎧 Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured.
Dr. Patel gently places his fingers on my still intensely bruised ankle. Behind him is a medical resident. The resident looks at the x-ray of my ankle with a skeptical look on his face, as if to say, I wonder how that’s going to heal.
“It doesn’t hurt,” I say for the second time during the visit, even though it isn’t true.
He and the resident exchange glances.
I want to heal. “It feels better.”
With a sigh, he turns to the computer monitor and starts typing. “Do you know what happens when you break a bone?” He clicks the keys. “The bone bleeds. Your bones contain blood vessels, and when the bone breaks, they clot and pool around the broken ends. That clotted blood has to become solid bone.”
The gravity of what he’s saying, the tone of just slow down, let yourself heal doesn’t register. “How close are we to being out of the boot?”
He continues typing, eyes on the monitor. “We’re only in phase two.”
I ask how many phases there are.
“Three, basically. You’ve been through the inflammatory phase, fracture hematoma formation. The blood clots have done their job. Your ankle is now in the repaired phase.”
I like that it’s called the repaired stage, not repairing or potentially repairing. It’s repaired. Healing is inevitable—a done deal—so unlike the way the many mental health clinicians I saw spoke of the psychiatric diagnoses they gave me over twenty-five years.
He points to the X-ray on the computer monitor. The resident looks over his shoulder.
I ask if I can get the short boot, the quaint one that looks more like a shoe than a Storm Trooper boot.
They turn to me, their expressions an almost audible no. “This is the deep healing phase. Fibrous tissue and cartilage have to form a soft callus at the ends of the broken bone. They’ll join, and the hard bone will replace the soft tissue. This is serious.”
“And then we’re done?” What they don’t understand is that I’m also trying to heal from mental illness. My new psychiatrist has said it’s possible—even for me, whom other doctors had condemned to lifelong suffering—and although I doubted him at first, I want it desperately. It’s taking too long too.
“We’ll see,” he says, standing. “Stay in that boot.”
*
To speed up my mental health recovery, I could—maybe—change what I eat. The branch of medicine called Nutritional Psychiatry exists for a reason. Diet is key to mental health—everyone knows that.
My diet is pretty clean. One of the beneficial byproducts of the years I spent obsessing over my weight and food as someone with anorexia is that I know way too much about nutrition. In one of my obsessive periods, I ate by color: only green foods, only orange foods, only purple. Eating by color—the ROY-G-BIV diet—wasn’t yet a thing, but within the decade would appear in Food & Wine and on the Food Network. I learned about it from Dr. Terry Wahls, who cured herself of multiple sclerosis by eating three massive plates of kale every day and making sure her diet consisted of three cups of green foods, three cups of cruciferous foods, and three cups of color foods before she ate anything else that day.
Plus, I’m privileged. I live in a city and have access to fresh foods. Dinner doesn’t come from a convenience store. I’m not a child or teenager fed lunches packed with chemicals in the school cafeteria and left to go hungry at night.
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