🎧 Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured.
Around the room are weights, massage tables, a stationary bike, a treadmill, and yoga mats. Resistance bands hang from the wall. In the corner sits an enormous, inflated exercise ball.
Colleen, the physical therapist I’ve been assigned is very nice and very pregnant. She’s also very fit. She’s a runner and still runs long distances in her eighth month.
It’s my third time seeing her. I take off the boot and lie on the massage table on my back. I had visions of physical therapy being restful and relaxing, but it’s tedious and painful. Colleen is more taskmaster than therapist.
She stands next to the table and commands me to point my toes fifteen times. Restoring range of motion is the first step of physical therapy for a broken foot. Next will come strength and balance.
“Flex—then rotate left and then right,” she says.
Dr. Patel said I could be out of the boot as soon as my next appointment, so I do as I’m told.
An elderly man lies on the massage table next to mine. Liver spots dot his balding head and hands. A physical therapist moves his body, which is so thin it looks as if his bones might break.
Pain shoots through my ankle as I let my toes return to neutral. I wince.
“You don’t have to push so hard.”
The physical therapist gently rotates the man’s arm. The man’s face is passive, accepting.
When I’m finished, Colleen hands me the exercise band and tells me to do the same exercises using it as resistance. With her arm resting on her belly, she walks away.
I loop the band under my foot and, holding it, point my toes and return to neutral. Point and return. Point and return. My ankle is stronger. It has to be.
Colleen doesn’t know how important healing is right now. It’s not just my foot; it’s my brain and my mind. I’m determined to heal from serious mental illness, too—a possibility my new psychiatrist gave me after I’d spent twenty-five years in a mental health system made up of too many clinicians perpetuating the myths that psychiatric disorders like major depression and ADHD and bipolar disorder and OCD and anxiety and schizophrenia are biological, caused by a “chemical imbalance,” and lifelong, which they’re not.
Colleen comes over and asks how I’m doing.
I tighten my grip on the band, rotate my ankle left, and return to neutral. “I can do another set.”
Her brow furrows. “You don’t have to.”
*
Clifford Beers has become one of my heroes—in a way. Beers’s memoir A Mind that Found Itself is a harrowing account of his breakdown in 1900, his suicide attempt (he jumped from a second-story window, feet first), and hospitalizations in one asylum after another. The conditions Beers met with in the asylums made him worse. He was put in straitjackets, physically abused, emotionally berated, and isolated in a padded cell, among other injustices. While at the Connecticut State Hospital at Middletown, he vowed to get well and write a memoir campaigning for reform so no other patient would experience the horror he did. His descent into hypochondria and depression and panic and paranoia and finally mutism make my experiences of mental illness pale in comparison.
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