Life in Rewind. Terry Murphy Weible

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СКАЧАТЬ to prove himself academically before he could even consider applying to Clemson were creating further instability. It wasn’t just the work itself; even just getting to class became an enormous challenge. He found himself avoiding certain routes, making detours to retrace the journey back and forth dozens of times until he felt comfortable enough to continue.

      When he finally got to class, his preoccupations began to affect his ability to absorb information, and even his literacy. He found himself stuck on pages, reading the same sentences over and over again, trying to process information. It could take him several hours to complete an assignment of just a few pages. He began to feel the need to read every sentence backwards and forwards, repeatedly, until his mind was fully satisfied.

      It was the same for road signs when he travelled to class. He had to read them forwards and backwards, or he didn’t feel comfortable enough to keep driving. The college was fewer than 20 miles away, and yet the journey could take him several hours. He would become physically exhausted and ill just thinking about the journey and, as a result, he often wouldn’t go. And all the while Ed had no idea what was happening to him.

      Not surprisingly, his growing obsessions were becoming more and more difficult to conceal. If he happened to ride to the local fast food place, and his friends were driving, he would ask to be let out of the car before they went through the drivethrough, and he would walk ahead and wait for them to circle around with the car to go back out the exit. He would explain to his friends that he just wanted to ‘take a walk’, but when this started happening on a regular basis the guys started teasing him about his quirky behaviour.

      As his compulsions grew, in order to address the demands of what he would later find out was OCD, Ed began offering to drive whenever he went out with friends. He could no longer simply take a left turn into the car park of a local restaurant; he would have to drive all the way around the block and come in from the other side so he could take a right turn. Left turns were considered ‘odd’ and right was considered ‘even’. His mind rejected anything odd, and if he took a left turn it didn’t feel right. ‘It would drive us nuts!’ remembers high school buddy, Kevin Frye. ‘We’d go, “What in the hell are you doing, Eddie?” but he would either ignore us, or say, “I just want to go this way, that’s all.”’

      On any given day, Ed would obsessively tiptoe across tile floors, manoeuvring his size-12 feet into the centre of each square, trying to avoid the cracks of grout between each one. This child’s game was, for Ed, a deadly serious endeavour to avoid touching the lines for fear that something truly catastrophic would happen to someone he loved.

      In 1991, Ed had no idea he had OCD, but he knew there was something different about the way he thought and his need to do things a certain way. But seeking medical help wasn’t even a consideration, because thinking differently, to Ed, didn’t constitute an illness. He was putting himself under a lot of pressure to try and make a bid for Clemson, and didn’t have many cheerleaders to support him, so he decided to get away-head back to South Carolina where everything seemed brighter and he, ostensibly, had a plan. On his own, he decided he would take the classes he needed to fulfil Clemson’s academic requirements for admission locally, then enrol as a full-time Clemson student, make the team, and play the following year.

      To start, Ed figured if he showed up at the athletic centre every day with his buddies to attend team workouts he would continue to be noticed and evaluated in a positive light, and that he would prove his value as a potential member of the team.

      He certainly wasn’t disappointed on his arrival. Rudy, Coach Wade and the guys on the team seemed happy to see him, and acknowledged his dramatic physical change. His plan was to stay in halls with his buddy while he tried to get classes worked out at the local community college, and hang out with the team as much as possible. And since his buddy Rudy carried a lot of weight as one of the Tigers’ star players, Ed was given more latitude to hang out on the sidelines during practice, and occasionally throw the ball around with the other players.

      ‘Not everybody liked him being on the field,’ says Rudy, who would later go on to play in the NFL for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Washington Redskins. ‘But we’d put on our pads and he would be out there throwing the ball with us. He had a great arm, and the coaches were watching him.’

      Rudy knew Ed was still struggling emotionally with the loss of his mother, and because the two were ‘like brothers’ as children growing up in Stoughton, and he regretted the fact that he hadn’t been around to help Ed through it, Rudy was determined to use the small amount of influence he held within the Clemson football programme to help Ed get a shot as a walk-on the following year. ‘I was trying my best to help Ed, but it’s really hard to play as part of the team if you’re not there on scholarship.’ Rudy knew it was a long shot.

      If nothing else, Ed is persistent-so, regardless of his unofficial student status, Ed was practising with the team and hanging out with the players after practice was over, and he would use every opportunity he could to spend time talking to Coach Wade. But no matter how much access he was granted, or how many heartwarming conversations he had with Wade, there would be no happy ending to this part of Ed’s story-not at Clemson, at least. As the OCD quickly metastasized, unbeknownst to Ed, he found himself unable to attend the local community college where he was trying to earn the grades that Clemson would find acceptable.

      With increasing frequency, Ed would see flashes of himself as a young boy, standing in the hallway, watching his mother pass, and be so consumed that he found it hard to concentrate. And these visions led to his incrementally intensifying obsession with protecting his father, who was healthy and happy living back in Cape Cod.

      The turning-point came one day as he walked across campus from halls to the athletic field. He came to a fork in the path and was suddenly gripped by an overwhelming fear when he looked to the left-and saw the image of a skull and crossbones. He panicked and froze, shook his head, and looked to the right. Now he saw images of his father getting killed in a terrible car accident. Back and forth, he looked at the two spots. Left: skull and crossbones, right: fatal accident. Ed couldn’t move, stricken with terror that if he stepped forward, even an inch, someone would die.

      These vague, unsettling feelings, and the harrowing moments when nothing ‘feels right’, are elements of OCD that defy logical explanation. They come in varying degrees to victims of the disorder, and in Ed’s case were extraordinary and severe. But the torment in not knowing why the thoughts are occurring, and the fact that there is nothing tangible on which to hang them, is sheer anguish for sufferers.

      For more than two hours, Ed stood helplessly frozen in place in the path of a rush of students, forced to detour round him as they headed to class. The embarrassment of not being able to move was dwarfed by the terror that any move he made had the potential to affect the life of his father.

      ‘OCD is like having your head in a vice…it keeps cranking and turning, getting tighter and tighter, and the only way to relieve it is to do its bidding,’ says Ed. ‘At the same time, you’re rejecting the thought process because you want to function properly.’

      Closing his eyes and rocking back and forth, trying to soothe the wild beasts in his mind, Ed began trying to think of happier moments to distract him from the painful vision that consumed him, and the humiliation of standing statuelike in the middle of campus. He finally became ‘unlocked’, he says, by thinking of Star Wars and recalling the first time he saw The Empire Strikes Back. Ed seized that fleeting moment, turned around and ran back the way he came to find a pay phone and ring his father to confirm that he’d made the right decision.

      Bob knew Ed’s concern over his health and well-being through the years was extraordinary, but he remained sympathetic because he knew it stemmed from the loss of his mother. Still, this call was a signal to him that things were not going СКАЧАТЬ