Life in Rewind. Terry Murphy Weible

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       Chapter 4 Something About Michael

      In 1992, the same year Ed got stuck on the path at the Clemson University campus, Michael Jenike got stuck, too. The internationally renowned psychiatrist was held up in a car sitting outside a Worcester, Massachusetts, medical building, paralysed, physically unable to move. He was drowning in a depression so debilitating that he was unable to get out of the car and walk into the office. It wasn’t until the therapist with whom he had an appointment that day came outside and offered to escort him into the building that he was able to move. All of the loss, anger, sadness and fear from his years in Vietnam had finally caught up with him. Michael was suffering from a sudden onset of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder triggered by a bout of viral encephalitis (brain inflammation).

      It was during a trip to Thailand and Malaysia, where he was giving talks on OCD, that Michael had contracted the disease. His cognitive function had become severely impaired, and his recovery was followed by a depression that triggered the PTSD. In a span of one 24-hour period, he went from a gregarious, robust, energetic man to someone who, quite literally, wanted to jump off a bridge.

      Michael hadn’t experienced the devastating after-effects of war. He’d never fallen victim to alcoholism or drug addiction upon returning home, the way other vets had. ‘I went to war and came back. I thought everything was fine,’ he recalls. But in actuality Michael was far from fine. The memories of friends and innocent Vietnamese civilians killed in a war that, to him, made no sense at all were now at the forefront of his mind. Why me? he thought. Why did I survive? It was a question with no logical answer, and it consumed him. He remained ambiguous with his colleagues, including the Chairman of the Psychiatry Department, who was a friend, about why he was unable to work, telling them only, ‘I can’t do these things right now.’

      The experiences of a war that had happened 24 years earlier were only now affecting Michael’s consciousness, and he would not be allowed to move forward until he’d dealt with the horrific images that were plaguing his mind. ‘I didn’t even know that I had any traumatic stuff in my head, until this happened,’ he maintains.

      Michael was drafted into service just as he finished working on his Master’s degree in biology at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). Student deferments from military service had been abolished. Because he hadn’t been born in the US, and because his mother was British, he could have simply avoided the war altogether by acquiring a British passport and declaring UK citizenship. It would have been an easy out. In fact, he was encouraged by his father, who had never spoken in detail about his own experience as a soldier in the Second World War, to take advantage of his UK birth and escape the potential horror that awaited him in Southeast Asia. But Michael believed it was wrong to live in a country and not perform the duties that being a citizen there entailed. This very patriotic attitude, along with an innate affinity for a challenge-intellectual and physical-made him destined for war.

      Born in Edinburgh, Michael is the oldest son of Andrew Jenike, a distinguished officer of the Polish Army who’d escaped to Britain during the Second World War, and Una, the beautiful, dark-haired model with whom Andrew fell in love after spotting her in a local shop in Ipswich. Andrew Jenike was a mechanical engineering graduate of Warsaw Polytechnic Institute who later obtained his PhD in Structural Engineering from the University of London, and is today hailed around the world as the ‘father of mass flow theory’.

      Michael’s grandfather, an employee of the Royal Hospital School (built for the children and grandchildren of British sailors and marines), had a home on the grounds overlooking the River Stour, near the village of Holbrook. Michael and his mother lived here for a brief time after the war while his father was away in Canada seeking entry into the United States.

      When Michael was four years old, he was admonished by his parents to stay away from an angry bull that roamed the pasture near his home. The grave danger that awaited him should he ever climb over the white fence separating him from the belligerent creature, however, only served to entice the little boy as he walked past the open field with his family on their way to the military parades at the school.

      One day Michael was playing by this pasture by himself when sheer curiosity compelled the four-year-old to fearlessly set foot over the fence. The bull immediately locked its angry eyes on the tiny intruder, arched its massive back in an aggressive stance, lowered its swaying head and began pawing at the ground, ready for a good run. Michael was in serious trouble.

      It’s difficult to imagine just how hard the heart of a four-year-old beats under pursuit by a 2,000-pound beast, or how long it takes for a regular rhythm to be restored once its owner is safely perched in the lofty branches of a tree. But there was plenty of time for him to calm down and wait for what seemed an interminable period of time before the bull lost interest in him and went away.

      While he waited high up in the tree, Michael was preoccupied with another kind of trouble-not the life-threatening kind, though it may have seemed so from a four-year-old’s perspective: the severe telling-off surely awaiting him from his mother when he got home.