Once the demands of caretaking for my wife began to take their toll, I knew that I needed professional help. I won’t go through the details of my therapy. I saw a psychologist for a year for psychotherapy, and a psychiatrist for medication. To be honest, I wondered if the psychologist could do anything for someone who “knew all the tricks”, but she was great – she took therapy in directions that I didn’t see coming. We developed strategies to deal with the immediate stressors (including the constant vomiting) and then addressed the long term personal and existential issues. She was close to retirement age when we started, and she retired after a year. But by that time, I felt like I was in pretty decent shape. I have kept seeing my psychiatrist, though. She picked up the slack of the therapy as crises came and went over the past few years, but we also decided staying on the medication would be a good course of action as anxiety has always been a part of my life.

Since that time, my wife’s recovery has proceeded well, although she will always have fairly extensive stroke-related disabilities. Our lives have been irrevocably changed, but in many ways our relationship has improved. We take things in stride considerably better that we used to. Things are not as stressful or upsetting. We have more fun together. How all this happened is hard to describe. But it has. Even when she was hospitalized again for a perforated bowel that involved surgery, more complications, and six months with a colostomy bag, the feelings of dread and anguish never returned to the levels they were. By the way, just like my inability to handle vomit, I never was one for handling shit. I had to look away when changing diapers, for instance. But, I was able to handle daily colostomy bag changes like a pro. Actually, that procedure is astounding. It’s amazing what physicians can do.

So, there it is. This is the end (at least for now) of my multiple blogs covering our own personal horror story. How we made it through that first year is beyond me. Yet, making it through has taught me (and us) much. The most obvious outcomes have been an increased sense of inner calmness and patience. While we were in the midst of it all, I was never able to see the end. I felt swallowed into a black morass, and I was so afraid all of the time. Hence the horror. Maybe this deepened my fondness for horror stories. Who knows? 

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, while I was a full time caretaker, basically a single parent, and also the chair of my department at the university, I realized that my emotional state was not the best. Being a caretaker is something for which you are not prepared. You have your life planned out and moving merrily along – you have goals, vacation plans, retirement plans, ideas for how to spend the next weekend, and so on. Out of the blue the planets realign, or fate catches up or God says, “oops, your turn for a crisis”, and everything flies out the window. I was devastated, hurt, anxious, and depressed. I realized the latter one day when I was sitting in my office staring at my computer monitor – I had been staring for nearly an hour. I was numb and exhausted. Here I was a psychologist and I didn’t even realize that depression had snuck up on me.

Anxiety disorders run in my family, and the heritable trail seems to run backwards through my mother’s side of the family. Looking back from my professional adult perspective, I could recall examples of generalized anxiety and OCD in adult relatives. Also, there were a fair number of heavy drinkers, which probably served as a form of self-medication for these folks as a way to cope with the anxiety. Various forms of tic disorders were present in the same group, including my mild form of Tourette syndrome, but the latter seem to be associated with OCD and not depression. Depression, though, wasn’t immediately obvious.

I remember an onslaught of OCD when I was in middle school, and I always had a heightened form of generalized anxiety. The Tourette syndrome was more or less in the mix, and that may have had its origins before the OCD. Ironically, I “treated” my own OCD by using a technique called response prevention. I was only around 15 when I started working the process – so I can confidently claim that was probably one of the initial precursors to my interest in psychology. I started devising my own cognitive-behavioral therapy before I even knew there was such a thing. Anyhow, I was able to get the OCD under control, but the generalized anxiety was a stable part of me. Over the years it would rise and fall, but never be debilitating.

Now, though, added to the generalized anxiety (which was also escalating to record levels), came the depression related to my wife’s health. And, to complete the trifecta, a resurgence of tics was occurring. Time for professional help.

About two weeks after her surgeries for the removal of the adrenal gland and the renal cell cancer, my wife started vomiting. This wasn’t just an occasional “blast”, but a more or less constant barrage. Hour after hour. At first, everyone thought “she has the flu…” which made sense… it was late January or early February when it started.  But it wasn’t the flu… or a virus, or something related to the immune system, or some complication from the recent surgeries, or something related to the endocrine system, or bone cancer, or some strange gastro-intestinal disorder. All of these things (and more) were examined as potential causes. The vomiting continued, except for short respites, until June – nearly five months. The short respites (if you could call them that) occurred when she was hospitalized. Sometimes it would take a day or two in the hospital, other times it took a week or ten days to bring the vomiting under control. In June the vomiting just trailed off. The official diagnosis was “neuropathic” vomiting. Or, as one physician honestly told me, “a clinical way of saying we not sure what the hell was going on”. That wasn’t entirely true – the cause was the brain randomly setting the process in motion and the not being able to turn it off. Hence the “neuropathic” term. A small dose of an anti-depressant seemed to do the trick. She was prescribed it with the hopes that it would calm the system down. For whatever reason, that worked.

This was a brutal time for us. My wife felt absolutely miserable, which is easy to understand. For me it was a different story. I hate vomiting. I hate the sight of it, the sound of it, and the smell of it. I realize that no one loves it (although, somewhere out there, people probably exist who relish the sensation). However, there are people who can manage being around sick people and clean up vomit without blinking an eye. They are capable of wallowing in the stuff and barely flinch. These creepy bodily functions are just no big deal for them.  I could never understand how they did that. Not me though. Just hearing someone retch from afar can make me gag. So, I actually fear being around anyone who may be ill or is getting ill. Needless to say this was a huge challenge.

More next blog...

The evening before her stroke, my wife received a call from her endocrinologist. Ann had broken her foot many months before and the bone was not healing. The investigative efforts were turning up nothing as the cause for this mystery. Then, one of the many physicians along the way wondered about an endocrine-related cause. Sure enough, the endocrinologist discovered that Ann had Cushing’s syndrome, caused by a tumor on either the pituitary gland or the adrenal gland. So, the endocrinologist was calling the night before her stroke giving her the news and beginning to discuss the next steps.

Cushing’s syndrome is an odd condition. As a result of this (usually) benign tumor, the body is exposed to prolonged exposure to massive amounts of the hormone cortisol. The result is a bizarre set of symptoms: rapid weight gain, insomnia, hypertension, thinning of the skin (results in frequent and easy bruising), moodiness and irritability, muscle and bone weakness (hence the inability of the broken foot to heal), and a whole host of other symptoms.

The thinning of the skin is critical for understanding the likely cause of her stroke. Nine days prior to this phone call from the endocrinologist, Ann was in a pretty severe automobile accident. Our relatively new car was totaled, but other than some soreness and being shaken Ann was okay. The next day she developed nasty looking bruises around her waist and a diagonal bruise from the left shoulder to her lower right side. If you can imagine the position of a seatbelt and shoulder harness, you have the idea of the shape of the bruise. The force of the crash created a bruise the entire length of the restraint. What we didn’t know was that the Cushing’s syndrome not only weakened the external skin, but also internal “skin”. Her right carotid artery dissected in the crash. The scar tissue took ten days to break off from the dissection in the carotid artery and worked its way to the brain and caused the stroke (at least this is my running hypothesis).

Ann was in the hospital for 35 days. The first task was stabilization, and then occupational, physical, and speech therapy to prepare her to come home. While in the hospital, the medical team thought they might as well check out exactly where this tumor was that was causing the Cushing’s syndrome. They already had plenty of head MRI and CT scans, so they knew it wasn’t on the pituitary gland. That left the adrenal glands to be checked out. We have two of them, one on top of each kidney. So, twenty days into the hospitalization, the pictures were taken. Sure enough, the benign tumor was found on one of the adrenals. But, unfortunately, so was something else on the other kidney. Renal cell carcinoma. Kidney cancer.

Needless to say, this was a stunner. Within a twenty-one day period, Ann had a massive stroke, and we learned she had Cushing’s syndrome and renal cell cancer. All of the specialists attending to Ann (and there were a lot of them) said that the cancer was the least of our problems. She first needed to go through the rehab from the stroke and recover to the point where she could manage the surgeries (one to remove the adrenal gland and one to get rid of the tumor). So, the surgeries were being scheduled for January. That would give her three-plus months of rehab time. 

The next three months were intense with frequent doctor visits and rehab therapies. We had (and continue to have) excellent CNAs who helped with home care. Ann was walking fairly well and gradually left the wheelchair behind and adopted a single point cane. By the time January rolled around, Ann was well enough for the surgeries. They were scheduled on the same day with two different surgical teams - one right after the other. The pre-surgical preparation, the procedures and post-surgery recovery took longer than expected. Some bleeding issues (possibly Cushing’s related) slowed things down, but everything went well.

We thought we were in the clear. But, no…

Strokes have an interesting impact on the brain and subsequently the body. Type of stroke, location, severity, and duration all intersect to have detrimental effects. In addition to the weakness and paralysis on her left side and all of the accompanying ramifications (e.g., foot drop, drooping face), my wife experienced some heretofore unknown side effects – at least they were unknown to me. For instance, she had “left side neglect”. When shown a picture and asked to describe what she sees, she would provide accurate detail of everything from the midline of the picture and to the right of the picture. It wasn’t that she was blind in her left eye, but seemed to not process the information. When asked, “what about the stuff on the left side?” she would reply, “oh sure, and then describe it.

Then there was the loss of emotional display within her speech. When we talk, our speech intonation rises and falls, and voice tone shifts with emotional content. For Ann, immediately after her stroke, this display of emotion within speech was gone. I found this one of the most devastating outcomes. He voice was robotic and flat. There was no liveliness, no sense of affect. It was like listening to an automated recording. The human part of her voice was missing. She would report being angry or frightened, but her voice would not display anything indicating this affect.

A final oddity for this discussion was the loss of her ability to do long division. The other mathematical operations remained intact.

Recovery from a stroke is a long, frustrating and grueling process. Physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy are crucial. Medical and rehabilitative advances are being made all the time. My wife gradually relearned how to walk, and now walks on her own with a brace and uses a cane. Sadly, her left arm and hand never regained much in the way of functioning, although she is able to bend her arm and slightly move her fingers. On a very positive note for me, her voice regained its ability to express emotional inflections.

At the time of her stroke, my wife was one of the country’s leading early childhood exceptional education experts. She was truly a rock star within this domain. One thing that surprised all of Ann’s physicians and therapists was her spontaneous ability to begin using special education strategies normally taught to kids with cognitive and language delays or learning disabilities. She would routinely implement certain interventions when faced with the relearning of certain perceptual and cognitive tasks. For instance, once Ann became aware of her left neglect, she prompted herself to examine all aspects of her environment in trying to perform a task. The result was a significant improvement in this area and a virtual elimination of this problem. In a similar manner, she was able to address her long division issue – at least to some extent. Truth be known, however, math was never her strong suite. So, I am not exactly sure what role the stroke played in this disability.

My wife loved being a researcher, a professor, and an administrator. It soon became clear to both of us, however, that the rigors and demands of being an academic would be too much for her to resume. So, after much weighing of options, she decided to retire.

Unfortunately, the horrors weren’t over.

My life changed forever on September 1, 2006. As I go back and look at this sentence, I realize I am making it all about me.

Not true.

This day changed the lives of our entire family.

At around 10 that morning, I received a call from my wife’s program assistant saying that she as not feeling well. Could I come downstairs?

My wife and I were both professors at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We had the envious setup of not only having faculty positions in the same institution, but our offices were in the same building, one floor away. Ironically, we still took two cars to work – mostly due to the fact that we had to take turns with parenting tasks and home tasks. Our courses were often late afternoons and early evenings, and someone had to be home to handle after school duties, drive to practices, prepare dinner, etc. Again, most people juggle the same thing.

Anyway, on that September 1, I went straight to her office, and it was clear that she looked terrible. My wife rarely gets sick, and her “look” was something that I have never seen before. She wanted to go home right away, and the bulk of our 60 second discussion was about how to get both cars home. Could she drive in her state? She thought “yes”, but that was truly questionable. Something was alarmingly wrong and getting worse by the moment.

Then it hit me.

Her voice was garbled like she had cotton balls in her mouth. The left side of her face was sagging, and she was slowly but surely leaning to her left.

She was having a stroke, and she was only 48 years old. 

When I said, “you’re having a stroke”, her look was something I’ll never forget. Fourteen years earlier her mother had a stroke and had died about two years previously. The impact of the stroke on her mother was tremendous – and quite negative in terms of disability. I knew this was going through her mind.

Her expression was one of devastation, and we both knew life would never be the same.

More next time.

Life has a funny way of unfolding.

With the publication of Birth Offering, I have had a couple of people ask me if I believe in the supernatural. The question makes sense since I have such a fondness for the genre. A fair number of these questioners are puzzled when my response is “no”. I explain that I am a natural skeptic when it comes to these matters. As a psychologist and a researcher I look for data and evidence. And, the evidence for things supernatural is sorely lacking, as far as I can tell. I don’t need to believe in order to enjoy being scared or unnerved by novels and movies. I don’t see this as any different from those people who like superhero movies or outer space science fiction movies. You don’t need to believe in those things in order to enjoy those films.

This is not to say that I am a skeptic in all things “otherworldly”. I do have a spiritual life. I am a Catholic who struggles with faith issues like any other person who has a faith life. I lean rather strongly towards the progressive or liberal end of the spectrum, which means of course that I feel frustrated with the church hierarchy and their actions and pronouncements over the last few decades. But, culturally I am firmly entrenched into a community of people who are important to me and who quite frankly are more spiritually supportive than the hierarchical types.

I digress, however. All by way of saying, I do have a spiritual life and have a fondness for horror novels. However, I am not a believer in the supernatural entities and events that make the genre so thrilling. For some, this may make no sense whatsoever. In fact, they may think these are conflicting states of mind. I suppose that could be true. I am very comfortable with it though. Living with this level of ambiguity is just fine.

There are realities that do scare or unnerve me, however. Much of them are internal – I am a natural at roller coaster states of anxiety. Adolescent OCD and life-long generalized anxiety make up part of my history. More importantly, external sources of distress also have played a big role in my life. Specifically, family medical crises (in the form of a series of critical health conditions striking my wife) have rocked my very life foundation to the core. The re-establishment of my own emotional equilibrium may be a lost cause. While the latter point sounds unsettling, it really isn’t. I have had to recalibrate my expectations and outlook – which is not a bad thing. Many people do it all the time. Why not me?

I will talk more about these topics in upcoming blogs.

As I’ve written about in an earlier blog, I can trace my enjoyment of the creepy kid sub-genre back to around 1960 where my six-year old self was terrified, yet simultaneously fascinated, by the movie trailer (or coming attractions as they were called then) of the Village of the Damned. The thought that kids could be monsters (not a surprise to my mom and dad, I’m sure) both scared me and thrilled me.

So, as I decided to start writing horror fiction, I guess it was no surprise that a kid would be the main protagonist in my first (and subsequent) efforts. Not to be outdone by other writers, I ended up with multiple kid characters in my debut novel, Birth Offering. The main character is Ryan Perry, my hero and, if you take a look, the kid who is in frequent peril. So, he satisfies the youth as hero character – well actually he more than satisfies the youthful hero description (I ended up really liking this kid). On the other end of the divide – the creepy kid character – Birth Offering has not one but three creepy kids. These fit the supernatural end of the creepy-kid spectrum. One ghostly apparition and two “feral” kids who are a lot more than just feral. These two kids, Hugo and Max, are my favorite creations. While they do not have a tremendous amount of “page-time”, their presence is hinted at frequently, and their actions are downright ghastly. A review on Amazon called Max a “thoroughly unsettling portrait”. I am really pleased with this description – I really wanted to aim for something like this.

I really focused on trying to create credible youth characters in Birth Offering. In the case of my hero, Ryan Perry, this meant making him seem like a typical kid despite the fact that he constantly faced extraordinary circumstances. He had to be smart and brave enough to consider and engage in dangerous courses of action and be in great physical shape to endure some excruciating consequences of those actions. He had to be impulsive enough and, there is no kind way of saying it, immature enough to engage in some stupid courses of action and also whine about the consequences. He had to be inexperienced enough to be flustered by the presence of a pretty girl – enough so that he could completely lose sight of the fact that something supernatural is intent on killing him.

My task for creating Hugo and Max was not that much different. These kids were monsters, but their actions and their behaviors had to be tempered with those that made them look very much like 12 and 9 year old boys. There was the selfishness and sullenness that comes with a 12 year old that was incorporated into Hugo’s character, and the cuteness that defined Max. The grounded characteristics really provided an extreme contrast to the horrifying nature of their actions when the deeds become evident. 

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.”

That was my initial thought as I started typing this blog on my laptop. The content of this piece, and maybe a few pieces in a row if things go according to plan, is the impact of having children and adolescents as characters in novels – especially horror novels. I know I’ve addressed this in some capacity before (hence the question), but I keep coming around to it because of one influence or another.

There are two ways, at least, where youth as character influence horror fiction. The first is child or teen as hero - or what quickly becomes child or teen in peril as the action progresses. I think this is a throwback to our youthful days when we read children’s books or YA books in which we had this kind of character. They’re still around in significant numbers in today’s youth fiction (e.g., the Harry Potter series capitalizes on this approach very successfully). Stephen King also makes fair use of kids in his novels. They stand bravely head to head with monsters, aliens, demons, or ghosts with aplomb that adults can’t begin to muster. King even ups the ante of terror for his regular readers because he has managed to kill off an underage character on multiple occasions. With king, you never really know if a kid is going to survive – or escape unscathed. All by way of saying, youth-as-hero or youth-in-peril strikes a chord – adventures we’ve come to enjoy and expect based at least in part on our reminiscences from youthful reading pastimes. Let’s face it, though, the youth in peril motif is a cheap terror. Most adults will feel a slightly heightened sense of anxiety if a well-drawn young character is in jeopardy as compared to that of an adult character.

The second “youthful” influence in horror is when the kid is the source of the horror - the “creepy kid” sub-genre of horror. They are the serial killers, the demonically possessed, the sources of the haunting, the dead, the vampires (as in Salem’s Lot, not those tiring paranormal romance stories), and so on. These characters “work” in horror fiction precisely because this behavior is so counter to our expectations of how young people should act.

There are numerous fictional accounts of these kids, and some are as old as the hills. My favorite “early” example is Turn of the Screw. The main focus, of course, of this work is whether the young governess is mentally ill and hallucinating when she encounters the evil presence of Quint and Miss Jessel. The alternative is that the ghosts are indeed real. I’ve always been intrigued by the behavior of Miles and Flora – the two kids. Are they complicit in the activity of the ghosts or unwittingly (or maybe purposely) gaslighting the governess? I may be reading way too much into this, but I always had my suspicions about those two kids.  Miles, after all, had just been expelled from school because of something unspeakable.

Okay, I’m rambling way too much here. I’ll continue with the creepy kid sub-genre in my next blog.

When I read The Shining, I was ecstatic. Here was probably the scariest novel I had ever read, and coming on the heels of Carrie and Salem’s Lot, I anticipated having a lifetime of unbelievably good reads coming from the mind of Stephen King. The latter expectation did not come true however, and I realize I was placing the author on a pedestal of my own lofty expectations.  After all, impressions vary as to what is scary. In addition, King is only human after all, and he wouldn’t always hit it out of the park. The best baseball players are successful only 35% of the time. Why would I expect him to be in top form all of the time.  Besides, I never took into account that my 20 year old self (or however old I was when I read The Shining) would change over the years after facing new experiences - all of which would color my viewpoints and reactions to what I read. 

While King and I have had our ups and downs (and we’re currently on the ups as I’ve really enjoyed the past three or four releases), one thing has remained true and that is my perception of The Shining. It still is one of my scariest reads. I haven’t reread it in probably 25 years, however, and I’m apprehensive about doing it. So, I think I will jump right into Doctor Sleep without sitting down to The Shining first. I’ll ground this reading experience as it is occurring to the character, Danny. Evidently, this is based many decades after the incidents that took place in the Overlook Hotel. So, I will treat it the same way – experience this plot many years after experiencing the horrors at that hotel.