Free Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Eric Manheimer Page A

along the way. We were overwhelmed by the constant episodes and treatments. We took refuge in our careers—it was the only place where we felt some control. All this has had a corrosive effect on our relationship. John and I blamed each other—if only you hadn’t been so strict or if only you’d been home. Why do you take her shopping every time she wants something? Had we done too little? Or too much? We felt bad and guilty all the time. We have to get ourselves back as well.” She finished all at once and the room was quiet. I didn’t know what to say—or if I should say anything at all.
    John started, “We came here out of desperation a few weeks ago. When Emily ended up at Methodist, our neighbor Glenn said he had emailed and then phoned you about a kid who had Emily’s diagnosis and treatments and asked what you recommended.” The “kid’s” case was not unusual at all. The feelings of helplessness are common, too.A kid’s symptoms can be a proxy for both parents’ and society’s issues. Society and culture and genetics all create symptoms. “ ‘It is time for a time-out’ is what Glenn said you said. Figure out what’s what and whose job it is to control it.” The two of them had gotten it out and looked relieved, a lot different from my first glimpse of them sitting in the emergency room. It was going to be a long haul for all of them. But it was not hopeless.
    I really didn’t say anything for the forty-five minutes they were in the office. A few mutterings, maybe a musing about experts and specialty knowledge. How tricky kids were as their brains developed. Every child manifested behaviors that could be called malfunction if we proceeded to medicalize every behavior. Is anorexia a psychological disorder or a social one? Is a child who is beaten or abused crazy if he bites back? Behaviors need to be understood within the larger pattern of the family and the society. Parents all make mistakes; that’s what parents do. But feeling guilty does not help. If anything, it makes everything worse. I walked them to the elevator bank, shook their hands when the doors opened. We agreed to talk some more.
    Emily and Tani were from opposite poles of the universe. A product of abandonment at birth, Tani had ricocheted like a pinball around a system desperately trying to find a safe haven. In her sixteen years, she’d had a couple of loving experiences between forced death marches in enemy territory. Emily was picked up by a car service and driven to her private school, then sat down to dinner overlooking a backyard with a Bach clavichord playing in the background. And yet barely out of first grade she was melting down and unable to regulate her emotions. Her parents had desperately tried to find the missing love, the missed signals, the early intervention that might have changed the course of their history, all in vain.
    Two social workers from child psychiatry, Ingrid and Ana Reid, were sitting in a booth sipping coffee when I sat down across from them. Ingrid’s description of Emily and her pedigree of doctors, diagnoses, and medications had led almost directly to the intrinsic problem—disentangling the skein that had enveloped the entire family. Illness, they would discover, serves everyone in a family; it focusesattention and resources. The family seemed committed to understanding and working through that. Emily was being released tomorrow.
    Then Ingrid turned to Tani’s case. She was determined if nothing else to make sure Tani did not have another experience in another foster home that reproduced the horror stories.
    There was one glaring exception in Tani’s list of tribulations, and that was why I had asked Ingrid and Ana to join me for breakfast. They told me as they developed a file on Tani that when
Abuela
Lola died three years earlier after her long bout with breast cancer, the kids who lived with her and her husband had been picked up by ACS and scattered around Brooklyn. The husband had