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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Disaster Boy

        I once knew a kid who was his own greatest threat.

        When I say this, I mean it. Throughout his life, it seemed like he was invincible. Accidents often happened near him. Catastrophe followed him around, creeping close, but never quite touching him. When things did happen to him, he would walk away, barely injured. This Disaster Boy was either the luckiest guy in the world, or the unluckiest. But he never thought anything of it.

        To this day, Disaster Boy has been hit by a car on three separate occasions. The first was a suburban backing out of a driveway as he walked by—it knocked him a few feet, but he got back to his feet and kept going. The second was a side-swipe from a Durango hauling ass down a residential street—a few bruises and a cut down his arm, but nothing serious and no charges pressed. The most recent time was on purpose; Disaster Boy made many careless friends who could goad him into doing some seriously dumb things—the truck hit him square on at 15 mph. 15 miles per hour doesn’t sound bad, but it’s enough to knock a boy a couple yards to the ground. In addition to this, he has been inside a car that ended up underneath a truck. He even managed to flip his own car—a worn down 1988 Subaru—off of a 50 foot embankment: he survived without a scratch and his car was running again the following day.

        Disaster Boy has avoided being struck by lightning as many times as he’s been hit by cars. Each strike is a little closer. The first struck a few yards from him, demolishing a tree nearby. The second hit a car he was riding in (a car which no longer runs). Most recently, the lightning struck mere feet from where he had just been setting up audio equipment for a concert—the storm came from nowhere, and people called it a miracle that he escaped unscathed.

        Disaster Boy has been pushed through a window by his older sister. He has jumped off of houses to the ground without injury. He has been stung by a swarm of poisonous jellyfish. He has nearly drowned on two separate occasions. He survived pediatric pneumonia. No, the world may want to hurt Disaster Boy, but something protects him.



        Disaster Boy does have a weakness, though: himself. It started out as shyness. He was always a “shy” boy growing up. He’d shrink in fear from meeting new people, and often couldn’t operate well in classes. Everyone wrote it off as typical childish behavior, though, so Disaster Boy was pushed over and over until he had to get over it. Disaster Boy managed to become more attuned to operating in public, but even to this day he has a fear of newness. It would be many years before he would search for answers or for a cure. It wasn’t a real issue, though. He could—as his parents would tell him—get over it.

        It was in High School that the real problems started. Disaster Boy would find himself spacing out in class. He would find that words on paper would shake violently and fly away, leaving him unable to read. He would find gaps of his memory disappearing. He’d wake up and be ready to leave for school, only to find that he’d actually just returned from school that day. Despite his crowd of friends, he found himself sad and alone. He thought dark thoughts—the darkest thoughts—and sought escape.

        Disaster Boy became his own tragedy. The cars and lightning of the world may not be able to hurt him, but he could hurt himself. His acknowledgement of his own worthlessness drove him to make bad decisions. His poor self-image became the subconscious cause of his anorexia nervosa. His issues consumed him, dragging him into darkness until he sought escapes through knives, drugs, and guns. He very nearly found his way out, but a light finally saved him: a counselor.

        It was a sickness, she told him. That’s not true, though. Disaster Boy knew that sadness was an emotion, not a sickness. Sicknesses make people cough or throw up. A disorder, then, if you prefer. A disorder? What was wrong with Disaster Boy?

        After several counseling sessions, his counselor found the cause to be obvious: Bipolar II disorder. Bipolar II disorder is characterized by cycling moods. Unlike Bipolar I disorder, Bipolar II disorder cycles between “normal phases”, “hypomanic phases”, and “manic depression.” What Disaster Boy had just survived was a “manic depression”: the disorder is triggered by chemicals in his brain becoming misbalanced, resulting in slower functioning—other symptoms, such as the ones Disaster Boy exhibited, include low energy, loss of pleasure, depressed mood, feelings of worthlessness, and thoughts of suicide.

        It wasn’t all terrible, though. The counselor explained that his hypomanic episodes seem much more frequent, and overall his “normal phases” would be dominant. In a hypomanic state, Disaster Boy would find his brain running too fast: his thoughts and speech may blur together, he may feel hyper-energized, and—in all likelihood—people would find him hilarious to be around.

        Disaster Boy was given mood stabilizers to help his problems. Lithium, Lamictal, Zoloft: none helped, though. Since they were having no effect, he was taken off of the medications, and was given exercises to practice for when he entered one of his “moods”. Ultimately, he found a balance, but it wasn’t long before other problems arose.

        Disaster Boy graduated from high school, all prepared for college. That summer, he went on vacation to a foreign town, though, and quickly found himself lost and separated from his family. All around him there were new faces. No one he knew could help him. He perceived the people around him as hostile elements. If one of them attacked, there would be no way of getting help. He remembered his chest growing tight. He remembered the choking feeling, the dizziness, and the nausea. He trembled as he sought out his family, separated only moments before. But then he blinked and found himself in their hotel room.

        Another trip to the doctors revealed the second of the internal threats to Disaster Boy’s invincibility: Panic disorder. Disaster Boy, as it turned out, wasn’t just shy or afraid of newness. As it should so happen, he was agoraphobic: physically and mentally afraid of being in situations where escape is impossible or help may not be available. Years of suppressing his fears had only aggravated his symptoms, pushing him to the point of blacking out in the streets of Gatlinburg, TN. Agoraphobics often find themselves physically immobilized by their irrational fears—you may find them frozen on bridges or in a crowd.

        To help Disaster Boy prepare for college, he underwent cognitive-behavioral therapy. He met with a counselor several times a week all summer. He learned ways to cope with the situation. He was taught that his paranoid fears were ungrounded. He took trips to the mall, and mingled with crowds to get used to the atmosphere. When things got to be too much, Disaster Boy learned how to “draw lines” between himself and others: he could picture an imaginary boundary between himself and others—something like the lip of a stage or a desk in the front of a room—and put it between himself and his “foes.”



        College would present entirely new issues for Disaster Boy. A new disorder peeked its head: anxiety. Perhaps one of the most common illnesses that college students encounter, Anxiety disorders revolve around stress levels and feelings of fear, unease, and worry. Disaster Boy’s anxiety attacks caused hyperventilation and more memory gaps. He was fighting a losing battle, and had no idea what he could do to be saved.

        Throughout his college career, Disaster Boy would continue to see therapists and counselors, doctors and physicians, but no one gave him much in way of a cure. He tried not to bother his parents with his problems: they had money issues, and they had never been very receptive in the past. His new college friends were there, but Disaster Boy was too scared to tell them about his problems—if he scared off these new friends, he would have no one. He was able to gentle his disturbing thoughts to an extent, but he found himself losing hope.

        Something sparked in him, though. One day, he went to a Wal-Mart. Part of his training to ward off his agoraphobia is to expose himself to crowds as often as possible. To do this, he’d often just go and walk around shopping centers. While in Wal-Mart on one particular day, he happened past the office supplies section and found a journal. It was just a simple, leather journal. Empty. The pages were waiting for him to fill it.

        And he did. Disaster Boy started pouring words upon words into this journal. He wrote down everything that he was thinking. He wrote about people he met, things that troubled him. He wrote about his classes, his friends, his family. He wrote about games he played or trips that he took. All of this writing helped him to focus away from his issues, and soon it began to feel like he didn’t have them. Now that Disaster Boy had something to focus on, he worried less about his issues.

        The problems didn’t go away, though. His newfound love for writing helped him discover things about himself that he had never known. He actively pursued answers to the questions that had never been answered for him. The most important question for his search though, was Why me?

        And so he looked and looked for the causes to his mental distresses. He learned that it is most likely genetic. His mother suffers from depression, like her mother before her. His mother’s father suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder—a result of seeing his shipmates blown to bits in an attack during Vietnam. He learned that, on his father’s side, he could have much worse coming for me. Early-onset Alzheimer’s syndrome may very well await him in the near future. In addition, the men of his family are genetically at high risk for Von Hippel-Lindau disease, which (on top of spawning outburst of rage) can cause tumors in the eyes, ears, pancreas, kidney, brain, and spine. 



        The truth is… I am Disaster Boy. You probably saw that coming. When I look at my past and all the complications that plagued me growing up, it seems like I am someone else, entirely. I’m no longer that same boy who starved himself so that he wouldn’t be fat. I’m not that same guy who lay in bed dying of swine-flu for three days because his stress levels destroyed his immune system. No—I’m informed now. I understand most of what I’ve gone through. It seems funny to me that so many things could’ve killed me—all that lightning, the car wrecks, the drowning—but they didn’t; instead, the closest thing that has come to killing me is something locked inside my DNA—the thing that has come closest to killing me is something that I can’t avoid, no matter how hard I might try.

        I often wonder where I should go from here. My disease is incurable. It’s treatable, but it is never going to go away. In a sense, it is what has made me who I am today: a disaster waiting to happen. I’m persevering, though. There are days when I wake up and realize how much work I still have to do. This triggers my stress disorder, which off-balances my hormones, which trigger my bipolar depression, which slows my immune system, which makes me more susceptible to sicknesses like my re-occurring bouts of mono which keeps me from working, which makes me realize how much more work I have to do—and then the cycle repeats. Yes, I have considered many times that I am in an endless rut, and that there is no hope. But there really is hope. That day back at Wal-Mart, when I picked up that journal, I knew that someday I would write about the boy I used to be—that boy who was ready for disaster to strike. But no more. I’ve made it this far, and I’ll be damned if I’m giving up without a fight!

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